(Barn Sour, Sail Away the Plenty)
News of a new collection of poems by John Ronan is always a thrill. I have known and admired his work since the time I read his first chapbook. A true Renaissance man, I think of Ronan as sitting in a rarefied and well-deserved catbird seat. Ronan casts a wide, wide net . . . quintessential lyric poem on one page, a daunting poem of space travel, AI’s creep, on the next. One of the poems in this new collection closes with this: “And it’s like that all around us. Almost everything.” Reader, get ready to peer into the “everything” of John Ronan’s oeuvre. Enjoy.