Matilda Sykes

Sep 10, 2024 | rb.gy | Matilda Sykes |Houman Barekat |Theo Graham-Brown

Declan Ryan's first poetry collection, Crisis Actor, came out in 2023. His poems are preoccupied with, and driven by, the weight and difficulty of expectation — of ourselves and of others. Ryan draws out the fear beneath expectation and ambition — the terror of stalling or self-thwarting — as he sketches the lives of marginal figures and underdogs who fail to finesse the systems in which they find themselves.