“There must be a crack in the poet of some sort. It has to be deep, privately potent, and unmendable—and the poet must forever try to mend it.” In her first book of essays, Pulitzer Prize–winner and former U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan includes insightful literary criticism, book reviews, and personal essays on poetry and poets—such as Emily Dickinson, Annie Dillard, Robert Frost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Marilynne Robinson, Stevie Smith, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. Writers will be inspired by Ryan’s distinctively fresh perspectives on the roles of art and poetics in a creative life.
