Description: "Martha Ronk's The Place One Is uses excellently selected variations in form to reflect on myriad alternatives to the ways we each approach our relationship to self, and our relationship to the places in which we sense that our being resides. Ronk grounds her poems in the California in which she lives, with moving emphases on its variations of landscape, its Pacific shoreline, and how much it is challenged by the ecological crises of our time. By speaking with courage and candor about the California in which she lives, she creates an unforgettable testament that goes beyond the particulars of this state, and speaks to all of us wherever we live, now and in the future. The Place One Is offers readers a revelatory performance. Her language is both immediate, and able to transcend this moment"--
Brief description: Martha Ronk is the author of thirteen books of poetry, a memoir, and a collection of short stories, Glass Grapes. Her books include The Place One Is, A Myth of Ariadne, Silences, Ocular Proof, Transfer of Qualities (longlisted for the National Book Award), 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.
Review Quotes: "Ronk is a great American visionary. The Place One Is gives us further evidence of her singular, exquisite ability to see what's there, what's on the edges, what's porous, ever-shifting in the in-between. Wallace Stegner once famously said, 'California is America, only more so . . . the national culture at its most energetic end.' Ronk's California is the US, the planet, the universe as it tumbles before us, beyond us, within us into dust."
-- "Gillian Conoley, author of A Little More Red Sun on the Human"