Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Crisis Actor: Poems

Crisis Actor: Poems

Ryan, Declan

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $16.00

ISBN10: 0374615993
ISBN13: 9780374615994
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Feb 25 2025
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.20
Height: 0.21 Width: 5.38 Depth: 8.25
Language: English

The brilliant and bracing debut collection of poetry from Declan Ryan: a writer, critic, and fierce new literary voice.

Declan Ryan's Crisis Actor chronicles various kinds of failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees, a hanged donkey and a bloated rat, solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths--these are the watchers, not the players. The poems are awash in rueful self-accusation and laconic skepticism. There are touching elegies, reportage, and bruised, wary replayings. A blistering sequence about boxers and their fates weaves through the collection. The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere, the halcyon days and brightness of years long past. This is the aftermath of being one who--in Matthew Arnold's words--has reached his utmost limits and finds . . . himself far less than he had imagined himself.

But there are still flashes of camaraderie, of stars aligning: lunchtimes in sunlit garden squares, languorous afternoons in pubs cheering for hard-won triumphs. These precious, precarious moments point to how we might reclaim potential, discover human connection in times of defeat or despair, and reach toward grace and redemption.

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