“Outsider” poet Laureate profiled and assessed at Slate. (Thanks, Amaka)

In a sense, Ryan is an American pragmatist, making her more like Robert Frost (about whom she’s written enthusiastically) than Dickinson. Hers is a parsing imagination, given to trying to differentiate between the real and the imagined, the real and the taken-for-granted. In “Carrying a Ladder,” she writes “We are always/ really carrying/ a ladder, but it’s/ invisible. We/ only know/ something’s/ the matter:/ something precious/ crashes; easy doors/ prove impassable.” While her work has deepened over the years—The Niagara River is her strongest book—she has always been most interested in the idea that “whatever reality is, it is something we only know in the negative—by being constantly wrong about it.” Many of the poems end on a note of deflation, pointing up the traps our expectations set for us.