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    The Niagara River
    The Niagara River
    The Niagara River
    Ebook87 pages53 minutes

    The Niagara River

    By Kay Ryan

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    About this ebook

    A mesmerizing collection from the US Poet Laureate whose work is “as intense and elliptical as [Emily] Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as [Robert] Frost” (J. D. McClatchy, American Poet).
     
    In granting the prestigious Ruth Lilly Prize to Kay Ryan, Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman wrote that “[she] can take any subject and make it her own. Her poems—which combine extreme concision and formal expertise with broad subjects and deep feeling—could never be mistaken for anyone else’s. Her work has the kind of singularity and sustained integrity that are very, very rare.”
     
    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Kay Ryan’s poems are “Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The Niagara River is full of such hidden gems. Bafflingly effective, the poems in this collection seem too brief and blithe to pack so much wallop. Their singular music makes it clear why her poetry has been featured everywhere from the Sunday funnies to New York subways to plaques at the zoo to the pages of The New Yorker and The Paris Review (Salon).
     
    “Empathic and wryly unforgiving of the human condition, the poems [in The Niagara River] are equal parts pith and punch. The effect is bracing.” —Publishers Weekly
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802197511
    The Niagara River

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    • 3/5
      Compact poems, satisfying in their brevity and weird music/rhymes, as if no one's rhymed quite that way, quite like that before. Real wit and fresh turns on trite and familiar sayings/sentiments. She manages to evoke quite a bit with few strokes--at times they feel like sayings or aphorisms, perhaps a little too neat and tidy, though. A comparison to Cornell boxes is apt.

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