Not Your Happy Dance

<p>Poems for the hopeless romantic to thumb through when their car breaks down in the rain on a lonely gravel road.</p><p><br></p><p>****************</p><p><br></p><p>Where else-but in Ryan Scariano's <em>Not Your Happy Dance</em>-might we find an irresistible love poem about a sweetheart canning dill pickles? Where else might another beguiling poem praise that same woman by feting her delight-dance her goofy little rumpus? In the infectious music of Scariano's poems a lilac has loamy eyes; sugar ants are little seasonal keystrokes; and vinegar can inhale summer's glow / and exhale that long amber breath. Wending through this collection each reader can be the lucky traveler who makes the claim that Muse Road snuck up / out of the fog / and kissed me.</p><p><strong> -Paulann Petersen</strong> Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita</p><p><br></p><p>What I have always loved about Ryan<strong> </strong>Scariano's work is its direct engagement with joy. Despite what the title of this zing-ful collection suggests these are poems that break like a rainbow might through a spectrum of emotion grounded in pleasure in awe in wonder. After I read this book I sat back and felt held by the nouns of the world real and imagined seen and unseen. This is a poet who knows how to live into language and by doing so he invites us to experience the splendor of fully being.</p><p><strong> -Emily Kendal Frey</strong> author of <em>The Grief Performance</em> and <em>Sorrow Arrow</em></p><p><br></p><p>Ryan<strong> </strong>Scariano's poems are filled with the kind of deep attention that makes the reader long to be its object-to be a starry green shard of sea glass a moth fluttering in the small white breeze or the wounded heart on blackbird's sleeve. It's entirely possible to be seduced by a voice on a page. That's what happened to me six years ago when I read Ryan's first book <em>Smithereens</em> and I've been waiting for this book ever since.</p><p><strong> -Henrietta Goodman</strong> author of <em>All That Held Us </em>and <em>Take What You Want</em></p><p><br></p>