Golias Books will publish my first full-length collection of poetry in spring 2019. It collects three previously published (or in the case of Story One: pseudo-published) collections along with a new one called, Old Business, which has actual poem titles. Actual. Poem. Titles. Here’s a provisional write-up from the generous editors, Lawrence Giffin and Chris Catanese:
Ryan Dobran’s Old Business comprises four long poems: three chapbook-length works that have seen limited release by small presses in the UK—Story One, The Meritocrat, and The Last Shyness—along with a suite of new poems published here for the first time. The volume represents an attentive, accretive phenomenology of the contemporary, of the widening gyre of modernity’s immaterialization and its redoundings on the body. The four pieces represent a progression in Dobran’s work over time but are each in their own way equally finely tuned: both in the sense that each conceit is a sensitively calibrated instrument and that the resulting readings are crafted and critical, lacking didacticism and yet wryly, quietly instructive.