Elephant Rocks, Kay Ryan’s third book of verse, shows a virtuoso practitioner at the top of her form. Engaging and secretive, provocative and profound, Ryan’s poems have generated growing excitement with their appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Sometimes gaudily ornamental, sometimes Shaker-plain, here is verse that is compact on the page and expansive in the mind.
Special recognition for “Why Isn’t It All More Marked” and “Insult.”
This is not
a random fracture
that would have happened
to any leg out there;
this was a conscious unkindness.
