Our new poet laurate, Kay Ryan, learned at an early age that language was powerful.

Take, for example, the time when, alone with a group of adults, she described “my sixth-grade teacher’s bottom jiggling as she wrote on the blackboard.”

“I caused a woman to spit her milk across the table,” she recalls.

…

One who discovered her was the poet and critic Dana Gioia, now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. In a 1998 essay in the Dark Horse literary magazine, Gioia noted “the unusual compression and density of Ryan’s work.” Like Emily Dickinson, Gioia wrote, Ryan “has found a way of exploring ideas without losing either the musical impulse or imaginative intensity necessary to lyric poetry.”

Today, Gioia calls Ryan simply “one of the finest poets writing in America,” adding that she has “the gift of being simultaneously very funny and very wise.”

Here’s a Ryan poem called “Death by Fruit.“