Velocity at Rest: 99 Poems

Another fine book from Meat For Tea Press.

“Connolly Ryan’s new poetry collection, Velocity at Rest, is just what its title suggests: poems which paradoxically push forth with the speed of wit and muti-tasking language to the breaking point, before the words, whipped to their limits and leaving the reader amazed, laughing, stunned, and whirled about with their incessant and jocular wordplay, for a moment come to rest in a world reminiscent of St. Francis’s letters to the world and Mary Oliver’s pilgrim-like meditations. What a collection this is, where every poem invites you to step in and then stop and ask yourself what it all means—your family, your home, your memories and traumas and pent-up angers and, yes, those rest points only a mother and wife and family can offer, as you trod on your journey to wherever you are going, but resting too to listen to the trees and the snowflakes covering you in their resplendent beauty. Very seldom have I come across a book of poems that has satisfied the spiritual hunger in me like these.”
-Paul Mariani Author of Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman and William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked

“If macabre quietude beckons you, if closed doors invite you to open them, if a drizzle of decibels calls softly to your ear nest, if finch by finch is how you think, if paradox and what a one-letter-difference can do beguile you, if you hope for soft and softest second chances, you’ve found your book. Velocity at Rest lets you know you do not need to move to be moved, and that you may be beautiful enough/to make love to without even moving. As all good poems do, Ryan’s poems elevate everything including you while you’re reading them.”
-Dara Barrois/Dixon author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina and Extremely Expensive Mystical Experiences for Astronauts

“By turns funny and endearing, sprinkled with cinéma vérité from Western Massachusetts and New York, and Christian aspirations of kindness, love, and surrender, wordsmith Ryan gives himself to the passing nature he closely and chiasmatically observes, bearing forth the fruit of a deeply personal poetic journey.”
-Dorion Sagan Author of Cooking With Jesus

“In this debut collection, the poet has woven strands from the last two centuries of English verse. Here, we explore landscapes – psychic and geographic- reminiscent of Sylvia Plath. There’s a lyricism akin to Dylan Thomas, and a pantheistic sprawl that attains the Whitmanesque. But be assured: This is no mere exercise in canonical pastiche. Ryan never shies away from the predicaments of our current age. He writes of cell phones and Ritalin, “Life Coaches” and genocide. Throughout, he deftly threads the needle between satire and sympathy.”
-John Purin– Editorial Director, Jubilation Research International