You are hereMidwest Poets Series presents Kay Ryan

Midwest Poets Series presents Kay Ryan

Start: 01/27/2011 7:00 pm

Rockhurst University continues the 2010-2011 Midwest Poets Series with an evening featuring poet Kay Ryan. The reading will be held Thursday, January 27, 2010, at 7:00 PM, in Sedgwick Hall, Mabee Theater, on the campus of Rockhurst University. Tickets are $3.00 at the door.

About the author: Poet laureate of the United States from 2008 to 2010, Kay Ryan will deliver the annual Rev. Robert R. Burke, S.J., Memorial Reading in celebration of her latest collection, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove, 2010). The Poetry Foundation has called her “One of the great living American poets.” She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and has earned fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. For many years, Ryan has limited her professional duties to the part-time teaching of remedial English at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., leaving much of her life free, as she says, for “a lot of mountain bike riding plus the idle maunderings poets feed upon.”

For information about this series or other Rockhurst University cultural events, call The Center for Arts and Letters 816) 501-4607 or (816) 501-4828 or visit www.rockhurst.edu/artsandletters.

Location:

Street:: Rockhurst University, Sedgwick Hall, Mabee Theatre
Additional:: 5225 Troost Avenue on the campus of Rockhurst University
City:: Kansas City
Province:: Missouri
Postal Code:: 64110
Country:: United States

Book List

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

By Kay Ryan

$24.00

ISBN-13: 9780802119148
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Grove Press, 3/2010

Other Editions of this Title

Ryan's recent appointment as the Library of Congress's sixteenth poet laureate is just the latest in an amazing array of accolades for this wonderfully accessible, widely loved poet. The two hundred poems in Ryan's "The Best of It" offer a stunning retrospective of her work.

Praise for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems…

“Everything [Ryan’s] eye falls upon takes on a brisk, beautifully complete clarity. Her tidy lines disguise an enormous intelligence and tonal warmth: a ferocious capacity for finding the essence of things. The Best of It reveals that right before our eyes Ryan has become a classic American poet.”—John Freeman, Los Angeles Times

“Ryan is one of the few contemporary poets to have imitators because she is one of the few truly compelling stylists now at work. Her voice is authoritative, confident, unfussy, exacting…she is astutely reserved, watchful, and understands that no one is special in his or her grief…So many “new and selected” volumes come out each year, but The Best of It is rare in being truly the best of the poet’s work so far. Kay Ryan is so disarming, so fresh and original, that she has earned her recent reputation as one of the very best poets among us.”—David Mason, The Hudson Review

“Ryan’s poems are consistent delights. They fizz with euphonies, they crackle with rhyme and off-rhyme…they are marvels of compact, slightly bitter wit…Ryan’s poems are what Robert Frost said all poems must be, momentary stays against confusion.”—Stephen Burt, San Francisco Chronicle

"The Best of It is a generous and nearly career-spanning collection of her verse, a greatest-hits album of a sort…you can’t help consuming [her] poems quickly, the way you are supposed to consume freshly made cocktails: while they are still smiling at you. But you immediately double back—what was that?—and their moral and intellectual bite blindsides you.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Melancholy lucidity is Ryan’s greatest gift, and it can be heard in all her most successful poems. But her most startling discovery is that melancholy, with its tendency to brood and spread, is best contained in a form that is tight, witty, almost sprightly sounding. Her poems are often built on the logic of the pun, taking an ordinary word or dead cliché as a title and then jolting it to unexpected life.”—Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker