Grass Whistle / Amy Dryansky

In her second collection of poems, Amy Dryansky’s intrepid speaker sets off once again, this time into the deceptively open field of adult life. Along the way she pushes at the boundaries of identity and connection, questioning our perceptions of selfhood and motherhood, marriage and relationships, fidelity and faith. These poems have a sense of humor; they play with language and meaning, but the questions they ask are serious: what do we want to be when we grow up? How will we know when we get there?

“What I like about these voicy speech-songs is their willingness to be musical and funny and open-hearted all at once.  Yes the self is double and triple, right out of the box—we know that and Dryansky knows that—but this speaker’s urge to earnestly record what it feels like to be a thinking and emoting person in this cynical age is moving because it shows us that art can be multifaceted and complex without being too clever.  I love too how much this speaker honors the world despite what she tells us she has lost—that ‘dark underneath’ underneath it all.  These bouncy meditations about the world ‘of inwardness and awkwardness’ remind us that there are some things poetry gives us that other forms of writing can’t.  And yes it’s intimacy I’m speaking of here, and the primacy of the individual’s experience as she witnesses everything from a collective wind ‘singing in the mouths of birds’ to the clear plastic tape on each six-pack of Fruit of the Loom.  Read this book.  It will make you feel better about your species.”

“Amy Dryansky never fails to bespeak the ‘preeminence of the body’ nor to remember ‘the brain is wider than the sky.’ And thus here, before you, in your hands are judicious poems that reconcile the spiritual freedom of your spine and the presiding restraint at the doorstep of your brainstem.  In this dance is a lyricism that feels gorgeously fresh: present always is a transported music and a deft eye that makes her poems, like that from the best of poets, feel sponsored by all of the natural world which she renders as exquisitely as she does her own life.”