Kay Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2008. Kay Ryan’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and others. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The essays that appear here are from her first collection of selected prose, Synthesizing Gravity (Grove Atlantic, 2020).