April 13, 2023

Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children, by Kerry Ryan

There is a line from Kerry Ryan’s first poetry collection THE SLEEPING LIFE that I’ve been thinking about for almost a decade and a half since I first read it, the line about the click of her partner’s glasses on the bedside table at the end of the day: “I wait for it all day.” And what remains just as true about Ryan’s vision all these years later as I picked up her latest DIAGNOSING MINOR ILLNESS IN CHILDREN (and read it in a single sitting) is the way she manages to capture those moments of every day existence so fleeting that most of us fail to notice until we see them articulated in a line of her poem, and declare, “Yes, THIS. The miracle of existence in a nutshell!”

Or, as I wrote in my blurb for the book: “Once again, Kerry Ryan’s singular vision and attention to perfect details works to render the ordinary absolutely extraordinary, the world shown anew through these poems about bodies, birth and motherhood, and the wildness of all of it.

Meeting Kerry Ryan at my husband’s colleague’s wedding fifteen years ago (he was marrying her sister!) was such a fortunate event for me, which I was not wholly expected when I was introduced to “another Kerry who likes books.” What are the odds that that other Kerry’s debut poetry collection would be so dazzling, speak so clearly to my soul? That she would end up contributing one of my favourite essays to the anthology The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, “Confessions of a Dilly-Dallying Shilly-Shallier.” That she would introduce me to the wonderful Ariel Gordon! We’d also hang out in her home of Winnipeg in 2014 where lines from her second collection Vs. (about being a bookish non-sporty girl who takes up boxing) were displayed outside her gym.

So I’ve been waiting a long time for a new book by Kerry Ryan, and I’m thrilled that DIAGNOSING MINOR ILLNESS IN CHILDREN (with gorgeous cover art by Julie Morstad, who is my favourite!) is entirely worth the wait, Ryan turning her eye to parenthood and its excruciating wonderment, to losing a parent, to love and marriage in middle age, noticing everything, those perfect details. This is truly a book to savour.