Book Review: Synthesizing Gravity

Synthesizing Gravity

Selected Prose

by Kay Ryan

Grove Atlantic

Grove Press

Grove Atlantic

Nonfiction (Adult)

Pub Date 24 Apr 2020

I am reviewing a copy Of Synthesizing Gravity through Grove Atlantic/ Grove Press and Netgalley:

This book gathers a thirty year selection of Kay Ryan’s probings into aesthetics, poetics, and the mind in pursuit of art.

Synthesizing Gravity is a bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews reviews, and her private previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets — including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson.

This book is full of Ryan’s crisp wit, her keen off-kilter insights, and her appetite and appreciation for the genuine. Among essays like “Radiantly Indefensible, Notes on the Danger of Notebooks,” and “The Abrasion of Loneliness,” are piquant pieces on the virtues of emptiness, forgetfulness and other under-loved concepts.

Synthesizing Gravity is evident and with an introduction by Christian Wiman.

I give Synthesizing Gravity five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!