Not Your Happy Dance

Book excerpt: Poems for the hopeless romantic to thumb through when their car breaks down in the rain on a lonely gravel road. **************** Where else-but in Ryan Scariano's Not Your Happy Dance-might we find an irresistible love poem about a sweetheart canning dill pickles? Where else might another beguiling poem praise that same woman by feting her delight-dance, her "goofy little rumpus?" In the infectious music of Scariano's poems, a lilac has "loamy eyes"; sugar ants are "little seasonal keystrokes"; and vinegar can "inhale summer's glow / and exhale that long amber breath." Wending through this collection, each reader can be the lucky traveler who makes the claim that "Muse Road snuck up / out of the fog / and kissed me." -Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita What I have always loved about Ryan Scariano's work is its direct engagement with joy. Despite what the title of this zing-ful collection suggests, these are poems that break, like a rainbow might, through a spectrum of emotion grounded in pleasure, in awe, in wonder. After I read this book I sat back and felt held by the nouns of the world, real and imagined, seen and unseen. This is a poet who knows how to live into language and by doing so, he invites us to experience the splendor of fully being. -Emily Kendal Frey, author of The Grief Performance and Sorrow Arrow Ryan Scariano's poems are filled with the kind of deep attention that makes the reader long to be its object-to be a "starry green shard of sea glass," a "moth fluttering in the small white breeze," or "the wounded heart on blackbird's sleeve." It's entirely possible to be seduced by a voice on a page. That's what happened to me six years ago when I read Ryan's first book, Smithereens, and I've been waiting for this book ever since. -Henrietta Goodman, author of All That Held Us and Take What You Want