I picked this up in 2006 after I found out Kay Ryan was the judge for the Walt Whitman Award, just to see if there was any chance her aesthetic might match mine (The Erotic Postulate was shortlisted for the award, so you start to wonder what your chances are when you’re so close: one of the top 20 manuscripts out of the thousand plus submitted).
My take: compact poems, satisfying in their brevity and weird music/rhymes, as if no one’s rhymed quite that way, quite like that before. Real wit and fresh turns on trite and familiar sayings/sentiments. She manages to evoke quite a bit with few strokes–at times they feel like sayings or aphorisms, perhaps a little too neat and tidy, though. A comparison to Cornell boxes is apt. And totally opposite my aesthetic.