"This poem was born as I was trying to write a poem in Spanish and it wasn’t cutting it. It’s hard for me to get creative in Spanish. Also, growing up with Mexican/Mexican-American family, my Spanish tends to be on the broken side compared to family. I can still communicate okay in Spanish, just compared to English where it comes naturally, it’s easier, so I lean on that."
"Ryan’s openness to beguiling half-truth, to the ways in which aphorism and aperçu can say so much but only so much, is what makes her such a spry, wry reader and shaper of lyric utterance. For even though poems diagnose our emotional predicaments, they also re-immerse us in them."
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“The object I’m considering is a landscape, which includes recognizing myself as part of any landscape that I’m engaging, whether I’m looking at it, remembering it, imagining it, or writing about it, and whether that landscape is the rolling hills of California, a painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, a video by Zenib Sedira, or an argument for public parks by Fredrick Law Olmsted."
