Title: How I Got Lost So Close to Home
First published: 1999
Description: “Amy Dryansky’s poems open the moment of experience for fresh possibilities of understanding. By this, I mean the impact of her language, her vision, and her quest bring us to the point of moving beyond the poems. We are given more in this book than in most collections because the poet has not held anything back. We find ourselves on the other side of the book–that place any poet and her reader wishes to be.”
—Ray Gonzalez

“Amy Dryansky puts her faith in what Zbigniew Herbert once called the art of ‘uncertain clarity.’ Which is to say, she makes doubt her friend. She uses doubt—instead of being used by it—and gets it to do some wonderfully bright things in the dark. I mean bright as in smart: humor in the face of suffering, compassion without sentimentality, and that ache at the center of life—those are her specialties. These poems have their wits about them at all times, side by side with an honesty enviable for its calm and exactness.”
—David Rivard

“<em>How I Got Lost So Close to Home</em> is a joyous collection of poems written by a woman whose best gifts include accuracy and risk. I love the free-fall of this book, its vivid, spirited language, its truths. If poetry is a high wire act, Dryansky awes her audience. And it is in her willingness to try new feats—without a net—that she startles us with her sweep and balance, her poise in the face of the uncertain, and her nerve.”
—Deborah Digges
Subjects: Poetry, Women, American poetry, American women authors, Women authors, 20th century poetry, Poetry (poetic works by one author)
LC classification: PS3554.R865 H69 1999