Elephant Rocks

The former US Poet Laureate shares “fine poems that inspire us with poetry’s greatest gifts: the music of language and the force of wisdom” (Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize–winning author).
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.
“Kay Ryan makes it all fresh again with her highly original vision, her elegant, quirky craft. These poems look easy, but the deeper one delves, the more they astonish and astound.” —May Sarton, New York Times–bestselling author of At Eighty-Two
“Kay Ryan works toward an exciting art, much less sparse than it looks. This is natural history seen from an angle of vision that Emerson and Dickinson would have approved. It refreshes me to find poems that require and reward rereading as much as these do.” —Harold Bloom, literary critic and author of The Bright Book of Life
“The music of these poems is every bit as seductive as their reasoning. Her thinking flaunts the plush, irresistible textures of organic growth . . . Marvelous.” —Boston Review
“These poems show a poet who is terribly sly in her reckoning of our world.” —David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems
“So original, so astute, so pleasurable are the poems in this book, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if they’re still being read long after current critical fashions are dated.” —Poetry