Salon compared the poems in Kay Ryan’s last collection to “Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The Niagara River contains similarly hidden gems. Intense and relaxed, buoyant and rueful, the singular music of this poetry appeals to many people. Her poems, products of an immaculately off-kilter mind, have appeared everywhere from the Sunday funnies to New York subways to the pages of The New Yorker to plaques at the zoo. As J. D. McClatchy declared in American Poet, “she is an anomaly in today’s literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.”
