The Lost Roads Adventure Club

Book excerpt: In a collection of poems that moves from meditations on emotions to struggles with a cancer diagnosis, from the comfortable world of sun and sand to the jarring dark corners of the so, R. M. Ryan offers us insights into the experience of living. The Lost Road Adventures Club recalls the ephemera of times and places gone by: a rosary pulled from an old coffee can in a small, shabby church; the clicks of a record player needle at the end of a 45; dusty chalk coating the hands of a teenage boy laden down with textbooks. Though grounded in precise observation of the world as it is, Ryan’s poetry also offers the reader a boundless capacity for imagined adventure: “Why shouldn’t this road / outside of Verona, Wisconsin / / be called Epic Lane?” he asks. “Poems start / from everywhere.” Sometimes lighthearted and sometimes disheartening, his poems travel across the years as they help us reach a new understanding of what it means to be human.