Ryan's poems are often quite short. In one of the first essays on Ryan, Dana Gioia wrote about this aspect of her poetry. "Ryan reminds us of the suggestive power of poetry–how it elicits and rewards the reader’s intellect, imagination, and emotions. I like to think that Ryan’s magnificently compressed poetry – along with the emergence of other new masters of the short poem like Timothy Murphy and H.L. Hix and the veteran "maestri" like Ted Kooser and Dick Davis – signals a return to concision and intensity." Ryan tends to avoid using the personal "I" in her poetry, claiming that she "didn’t want confession. didn’t want to be Anne Sexton." Though distanced, her work is often deeply introspective, analyzing both the nature of the mind and the ability of language to mold reality.