Coming from a working-class family, far from the centers of American literary culture, Kay Ryan is a genuine literary maverick. Unlike so many of her contemporaries who teach creative writing in universities, Ryan has spent her adult life working in the trenches of academe, teaching basic writing at the College of Marin and, for a stint, at San Quentin Prison. As her poems attest, however, working outside the literary and academic mainstream has its advantages. During the eleven years between the appearance of her first book, Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983), and her breakthrough 1994 collection, Flamingo Watching, Ryan intertwined two main strands of modern American poetry to create her own distinctive style. In her mature poetry, Ryan fuses lines haunted by what T. S. Eliot called the "ghost of meter" with short-lined free verse. Rhyme is as central to her poetics as to that of a sonneteer. A...