Ryan Nowlin’s Time with the Season

Ryan Nowlin’s poems are intellectual, tender and surreal.  In Time with the Season, he takes the reader on a quest for understanding everyday consciousness.  Who am I? he asks. Where am I? “What if the graph of set / expectations is itself unmoored / and you no longer know / where you’re standing?”  While longing for intimacy and connection, Nowlin’s narrator turns to things in the world—an orange, a pigeon, or “a fly in the trash”—then he segues into the world of ideas, or surreality, ending smack up against our shared mortality: “you appear and disappear like a comma swimming against the current.”  Nowlin’s thinking poems are beautiful and seductive meditations on what it means to live in our time and our season.