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    Say Uncle
    Say Uncle
    Say Uncle
    Ebook88 pages31 minutes

    Say Uncle

    By Kay Ryan

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    “A poetry collection that marries wit and wisdom more brilliantly than any I know” by the Pulitzer Prize–winning former US Poet Laureate (Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief).
     
    Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan’s poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan’s fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and almost gleeful detachment that has delighted readers of her earlier books.
     
    Compact, searching, and oddly beautiful, these poems, in the words of internationally acclaimed poet and writer Dana Gioia, “take the shape of an idea clarifying itself.”
     
    “The first thing you notice about her poems is an elbow-to-the-ribs playfulness.” —San Francisco Chronicle
     
    “The short lines and quick images—almost snapshots—are elemental. Ryan puts them together, then pulls them apart, and twists them in playful fashion, as though she were an alchemist with a modern experimental attitude . . . Truly short-line, one-stanza (for the most part) wonders: full-brained poems in a largely half-brained world.” —Kirkus Reviews
     
    “Witty, charming, serious and delightful . . . her tight structures, odd rhymes and ethical judgments place her more firmly in the tradition of Marianne Moore and, latterly, Amy Clampitt. Those poets, though, wrote many kinds of poems: Ryan, in this volume, writes just one kind. It is, however, a kind worth looking out for—well crafted, understated, funny and smart.” —Publishers Weekly
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802197498
    Say Uncle

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    4/5

    22 ratings1 review

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    • 3/5
      Ryan's poetry is sly and spare. Could almost call it effervescent. However there's Ryan's version of spare and then, for example, Norma Cole's version of spare, which is to my mind, much richer and more satisfying. Although her poetry looks back to Emily Dickinson, Ryan's knives aren't nearly so sharp. Hers isn't a poetry that I would return to over and over. That said, I added a star (from OK to Liked it)because there are several poems that I admire. For example, "Star Block":
      There is no such thing
      as star block
      We do not think of
      locking out the light
      of other galaxies.
      It is light
      so rinsed of impurities
      (heat, for instance)
      that it excites
      no antibodies in us.
      Yet people are
      curiously soluble
      in starlight.
      Bathed in its
      absence of insistence
      their substance
      loosens willingly,
      their bright
      designs dissolve.
      Not proximity
      but distance
      burns us with love.

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    Say Uncle - Kay Ryan

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