The Best of It: New and Selected Poems
by Kay Ryan
Summary
The Best of It draws from forty five years of Kay Ryan's work, gathering her tightly wound, aphoristic poems about persistence, paradox, and the small mechanics of thought into a single retrospective volume alongside a handful of new poems. Ryan's trademark short lines are packed with internal rhyme and unexpected turns, so that a poem often works the way a proverb does, staying compressed and plain until it suddenly opens into something larger than its few words suggested.
The Pulitzer board's citation described the resulting book as a body of work that is witty, rebellious, and yet tender, a treasure trove of an iconoclastic and joyful mind, language that captures how Ryan's poems can be genuinely funny and genuinely serious within the same few lines. Reviewers have long compared her to Marianne Moore and Emily Dickinson for her quirks of logic and language and her gift for finding meaning in the least expected subjects, a comparison this retrospective collection makes easy to test across four and a half decades of published work.
Reading The Best of It means moving quickly through very short poems that ask to be reread the moment they end, since Ryan's compression rewards a second look more than a first skim. It suits a reader who enjoys poetry as a form of concentrated wit, alert to how a single well placed word can pivot an entire poem, and who wants to trace how one poet's sensibility held steady across a long career even as the individual poems stayed brief.
Historical Context & Significance
The Best of It won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; that year's finalists were Maurice Manning's The Common Man and Jean Valentine's Break the Glass. Ryan's work had remained relatively obscure until the mid 1990s, when national journals began reviewing it seriously, so the Pulitzer arrived after a slow, late building recognition rather than early acclaim.
Ryan served as the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010, the first openly lesbian poet laureate, and was reappointed for a second term before W. S. Merwin succeeded her. She received a MacArthur Fellowship the same year The Best of It won its Pulitzer, and went on to receive the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2013. Ryan has taught part time at the College of Marin in California since 1971, keeping her distance from a full time academic career even as her honors accumulated.