Dark Ladies & Other Avatars
Reviews
New takes on the “bad girls” and other mysterious women from literature, art and real life
Along with a capacious intelligence, reflected in her precise and quietly surprising range of vocabularies, Ryan offers us earthly pleasures, image after image. Her “dark ladies,” both past and present, illuminate the aesthetics of daily life in a way that makes the reader feel welcomed into their worlds as a special guest. But these ladies don’t suffer fools, and along with their material sophistication, they offer up ironic twists and sensuous asides. They are fine company indeed. Poem by poem, this collection is at once delicious and penetrating.
Leslie Ullman, author of Library of Small Happiness"
Leslie Ullman, author of Library of Small Happiness"
There is something decidedly urbane in the voice of Joan Ryan, the sprezzatura of courtly gestures, the souplesse of real silk stockings, a cheek’s slight flush hidden behind a mask at a masked ball. Black swans, dark ladies, and mortals brooking dalliance with gods circumambulate the perimeter of this literary edifice, rendering the moments of self-revelation at its core all the more poignant. Delicious in their dress-up and the role-playing of myth, these poems lure the reader in with their frisson, the delivery of this daughter of Shakespeare: a delicious, covert code—but one, at last, that is as bracing as the face of the Magdalene illumined by light cast from a single wick."
Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium
Dark Ladies and Other Avatars is an exquisite embroidery of delicacy, of color—weave and weft of words playing off each other—each poem seeming effortless, yet tightly contained, brilliant with detail and sly humor. Infused with myth, ekphrasis, fairy tale, the personal, and the persona, the book is tightly woven in wonderfully unique ways. And Ryan moves easily from language that hints at the Renaissance—even of Shakespeare’s sonnets—to the vernacular of a sixties Long Island teenager or even the persuasive patter of the advertising copywriter as the poem requires. Here is the mature poet, and her portraits are as keen as a painter’s eye,
Veronica Golos, author of Rootwork.