WARD: Poems

The Rumpus, in a review of his work, labeled poet Ryan Vine a raconteur, and his superior story-telling skills are on full display in WARD. The poems are witty, teeming with dark humor, political, playful, and the sardonic tone is pitch-perfect for our times, when we seem to have forgotten that an important survival strategy is the ability to laugh at ourselves.In its heart of hearts, WARD is a book about ethos and mythos, about the creation of a character and the investigation of voice. As one critic, Taylor Collier, wrote: In the tradition of Kees’s Crusoe poems, Berryman’s Henry poems, and to some degree Yeats’s Crazy Jane poems, [Vine] builds a series of poems around a central character as a means of investigating both interior and exterior contemporary realities.

WARD also reads like a book concerned with the beginning, middle, and end. The poet Connie Wanek wrote, the character Ward, part sage, part drunk, part father, part amigo, part real and part myth, meanders through the book, and his recurring presence, and the interplay between the persona of the poet and Ward, lend it a narrative quality.