A review by amyponds
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan

3.0

This poetry was fairly average, and I'm not sure why Ryan has gained such acclaim. She uses the same couple metaphors, similes, and themes in free verse (as far as I can tell) for hundreds of pages. I think that there are some good lines and poems in this collection, but that nothing really spoke to me or elevated my thinking. I found it a chore to get through the last fifty or so pages, but it had a pretty strong start. Ryan may just be the victim of a biased selection, but I am not incentivized to check out any more of her work from what I've seen here.