The New York Times has described R. M. Ryan as a writer who works “at the juncture of rapture and rupture.” In this new collection of poems, Ryan offers insights into the experience of living, moving from meditations on emotions to struggles with a cancer diagnosis, from the comfortable world of sun and sand to the jarring dark corners of the soul.

 

The Lost Roads Adventures Club recalls the ephemera of times and places gone by: a rosary pulled from an old coffee can in a small, shabby church; the clicks of a record player needle at the end of a 45; dusty chalk coating the hands of a teenage boy laden with textbooks. Though grounded in precise observation of the world as it is, Ryan’s poetry also offers the reader a boundless capacity for imagined adventure: “Why shouldn’t this road / outside of Verona, Wisconsin / / be called Epic Lane?” he asks. “Poems start / from everywhere.” At times lighthearted as well as disheartening, his poems travel across the years as attempt to understand what it means to be human.