Best of It Read-Alikes

If you enjoyed The Best of It by Kay Ryan, you may also enjoy delving into the work of some of the Bay Area’s other talented, contemporary poets:

: Suck on the Marrow

Camille Dungy

Suck on the Marrow, a historical narrative set in mid-19th century Virginia and Philadelphia, traces the experiences of fugitive slaves, kidnapped Northern-born blacks, and free people of color.
: The Mansion of Happiness

Robin Ekiss

With disembodied dolls, dank Parisian catacombs, the gilded interior of a Fabergé egg, and the unfathomable edge of Niagara Falls as the dominion of these poems, reading Ekiss's work is like peering into the perfectly still world of a diorama or daguerreotype: an experience both uncanny and uncompromising.
: Works and Days

Dean Rader

Emotionally and intellectually engaging, Dean Rader's debut collection of poetry undertakes provocative questions about identity in original, ambitious, and playful ways.
: Pleasure

Brian Teare

Asserting the lover’s body as a lost Eden, revisiting again and again the narrative of "the fall," Pleasure records the eventual end of mourning and a return to the ecology not of myth but of the literal weather and landscape of California.
: Come On All You Ghosts

Matthew Zapruder

"Zapruder’s third collection of hip, quirkily haunting yet surprisingly earnest poems is his best and most beautiful. He spans the major genres-love poetry, elegy, ode, friendship tribute, to name a few-updating them for the 21st century." - Publishers Weekly