Ryan’s first poetry collection, sweet hearts, was a debut of softness and love. Ryan wrote tenderly about the intricacies of falling in love with yourself, someone else and the world around you. the reckless kind is a triumph of a follow up.

In this collection, Ryan bares more than she did in sweet hearts and invites her reader to embrace their sadness, their vulnerabilities and the small things we discover on our way to finding hope; such as holding the hand of someone we believed lost.

The heartache and hope within the reckless kind is refreshingly genuine. Ryan’s words are not bursting with melancholic melodrama. She is honest and her style fluctuates effortlessly between conversational, heady and sensory, and scientific. Ryan tells a story truthfully; this ensures the strength of the entire collection. Ryan has crafted the reckless kind with a beginning and with an end in sight. Structurally, it is symbolic of how grief eventually leads to an acceptance weighted in both happiness and sadness.

Thus, even though Ryan herself professes this collection is sad in comparison to sweet hearts, she does not deny herself or her reader hope, and this is admirable. Ryan has undeniably harnessed her talent further since the release of sweet hearts and so she weaves the everyday with the celestial with the mountains and the ocean, masterfully. the reckless kind is quite simply beautiful.

“this space is all that isn’t gone,

a place to love these used-to-be’s,

these vacant homes, these

lost, lorn shrines”

[ode to the empty]