A Poet in Her Element
ay Ryan’s new book, , is a pleasing size: 200 or so pages, small enough to balance in your hand. The titles of the essays—“A Consideration of Poetry,” “I Go to AWP,” “Inedible Melons,” “To Be Miniature Is to Be Swallowed by a Miniature Whale” (taken from one of Ryan’s poems, “This Life”)—convey that same strange, funny, compelling intermixture of the large and the tiny, the
