The Place One Is - Paperback

by Martha Ronk (Author)

A collection from celebrated poet Martha Ronk considering the relationship between person, body, and place.

The Place One Is explores the intersection of person and place, the ways in which changes in the tangible world alter one's vision, bodily posture, vocabulary, and concern for--to take one example--the dwindling water supply in California. The body's position, its geometry, and the topography of the surrounding land become less and less recognizable as body and world blend together. Gravel giving way underfoot mirrors the way that words dissolve into mumbles, and the skeleton of a rusty car on the sand appears like one's own skeleton. Ronk shows that disintegration here is disintegration there. These poems also wonder at interdependence, considering how lines intersect and continue to connect us to the sea--and to islands, lagoons, greenery, sky, and space.

Author Biography

Martha Ronk is the author of twelve books of poetry and one book of short stories, Glass Grapes. Her poetry books include Silences, Ocular Proof, Transfer of Qualities (longlisted for the National Book Award), Vertigo, Partially Kept, and in a landscape of having to repeat. Her work has been included in the anthologies Lyric Postmodernisms, American Hybrid, Not for Mothers Only, and most recently in North American Women Poets in the 21st Century. She is the emeritus Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles.