Erratic Facts

A copy of this 2015 collection came into the store a little dinged up, so I took it home. I'd always wanted to read Ryan, and it turns out I like her a lot: she makes tiny aphoristic paradoxes mostly, turning thoughts inside-out like, in one case, a sock. There's a slight, God-like menace (a word she rhymes with Venice) to her experiments: in one poem, which the others make me think of, she toys with imagining saving an endangered ship-in-a-bottle by breaking the bottle, and asks, "Which death / will it be, / little sailors?"