The Best of It: New and Selected Poems [Paperback]

Kay Ryan’s recently concluded two-year term 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—her awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Ryan’sThe Best of It: New and Selected Poemshas garnered lavish praise. The two hundred poems inThe Best of Itoffer a stunning retrospective of her work, as well as a swath of never-before-published poems—all of which are sure to appeal equally to longtime fans and general readers.

Kay Ryan served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2008 through 2010.
She has long lived in Marin County, California.

2011 Pulitzer Price Winner for Poetry:
Awarded toThe Best of It: New and Selected Poems, by Kay Ryan (Grove Press), a body of work spanning 45 years, witty, rebellious and yet tender, a treasure trove of an iconoclastic and joyful mind. —Pulitzer.com

“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 Itreveals that right before our eyes Ryan has become a classic American poet.”—John Freeman,Los Angeles Times

“Ryan’s poems are as slim as runway models, so tiny you could almost tweet them...Her voice is quizzical and impertinent, funny in uncomfortable ways, scuffed by failure and loss. Her mastery, like Emily Dickinson’s, has some awkwardness in it, some essential gawkiness that draws you close… 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 intellC%