Ryan Tracy’s Lines in the Shed is a gutsy follow-up to his debut collection Tender Bottoms (2022). At home in the American quotidian tradition of O’Hara, Williams, and Wright, these poems never lose sight of what matters, what’s gay, what comes up short, what we can’t live without, and what endures in the daily struggle to live in the world with strangers, family, and—perhaps the book’s most urgent heroes—friends. In unguarded language that by turns sparkles and dares, these poems invite readers to desire the world as the poet does, to “take notice” (as the poems suggest), and to share lines of poetry as a means of survival… and celebration.
Lines in the Shed refreshes my faith in so many signs of life–under snow or ash, under the plow, under shadow. Stop my doom-scrolling and dig: for dandelion roots, for our own naked bodies, for “rust-colored fractals” of our blood in bloom. For a glass egg on the sill of an evacuated house, for owl eyes as much as walnut halves, Tracy’s lines strive so heartily through the varied darks and memory. When I read these fabulous poems, I feel like King or Queen for a day, as in The Decameron. Having escaped with our lives to the hillside over some plague-ravaged city, or never having left the house, whatever the death toll, the poems decree it as much of a crime to waste good light as to waste a good lay. — Nicholas Regiacorte
In poems that alternate between whimsy and wisdom, Lines in the Shed takes us from roaches to sensitive boys, on one hand, and from Chernobyl to the Catskills, on the other hand. The satisfying rhythms of Tracy’s words hint at filthy acts that your mouth wants to repeat. Whether we’re considering mountains greater than we will ever be or Derrida’s underthings, we’re redeemed by doing so. — Michael Walsh
Ryan Tracy’s Lines in the Shed moves nimbly through a dizzying array of scenes, some mundane, others extraordinary. Moments of quotidian life–making coffee, scrolling the phone, and walking down the street–become surprising encounters where spoken and unspoken longings erupt. The collection is a charged and changeable map of the poet’s desire lines, following the eros of everyday life, leading to places both ordinary and unexpected, but always finding their way back home. In the quiet and the ecstatic, Tracy’s lyrical gifts provoke and inspire. — Hai-Dang Phan
