How I Got Lost So Close to Home

Book excerpt: Matching a fine (and often funny) imagination to a sharp, plainspoken intelligence, the poems in How I Got Lost So Close to Home move through familiar landscapes: the busy intersections of streets and parks, the changing topographies of self and family, and the hard won territory of beauty in an imperfect world. With their remarkable clarity, Dryansky's poems make us feel as though we too are present in her landscapes, and not just looking at them. The gift of these poems is their exacting detail, their compassion without sentimentality, and their ability to draw us into what the poet ultimately calls "home," a fluid awareness of the self that must be returned to again and again.