Erratic Facts [Paperback]

Erratic Facts, Kay Ryan’s first collection since the Pulitzer Prize-winningThe Best of It, offers sixty-plus new examples of her swift, lucid style. Ryan examines enormous subjects with compact poems in which sly rhymes and syncopation lend an off-foot musicality to unnerving wisdom. These poems demonstrate the same quick-fire brain-work that has animated her verse for the last thirty years, in ways more daring than ever.

PRAISE FORERRATIC FACTS

“[Kay Ryan] has created a body of work of intellectual rigor and joy unmatched in her time. Her neatly carpentered verses, with their disassembled rhyming couplets and floating rhetorical questions, are the poetry world’s neutron stars. You can read around and through them endlessly and they never lose their luminosity or virtue. The more you read them the greater their pull becomes.” —John Freeman,ZYZZYVA

Erratic Factsshows how poetry can shift a reader’s thinking. Ryan’s pithy writing moves swiftly . . . demonstrating how the human mind dislikes change, sometimes behaves like a wild animal, yet can be sharpened despite blunt blows. . . . [Ryan] draws from science and art as she journeys through the landscape of memory, consciousness, loss and love. As with all her work, these poems are clear and lucid. —Washington Post

There is something different about this collection that sets it apart from the seven before it . . . [yet] Ryan is still doing what she has always done, getting at the mechanics and processes and thrills of the mind. —San Francisco Chronicle

Ryan’s tight, crisp writing makes the subject matter fascinating . . . The collection reveals many of the mind’s tricks and quirks, such as finding comfort in limitation, not taking action right away, and believing the illusion that things that stay in place are secure or firmly plantl£&