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In a landscape of having to repeat
by Martha Ronk
96 Pages (5.5” x 8.5” Paper)
ISBN: 1-890650-17-X
$14.95
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This book is the Winner
of the 15th Annual PEN
USA Award in Poetry (2005)
With
each poetry collection, Martha
Ronk has further refined her
unique use of the sentence, its
textures and tangents, to extend
the ways that a meditative lyric
might address the most intimate
and subtle experiences of living.
Yet Ronk's diction remains as
direct and urbane as it is mulitvalenced
in its range from serious to
wry to confidential to questioning.
In these poems, we find Ronk's
most stealthy syntactic turns,
returns, and juxtapositions,
which expose to us the rhetorics
we unconsciously use to frame
our perceptions of the daily.
In a landscape of having to repeat,
Ronk offers a language of attention
that is composite, disruptive,
and vibrantly immediate.
Martha Ronk is Irma and
Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College. Among
her poetry books are Why/Why Not (University of California
Press 2003), Eyetrouble (University of Georgia Press, 1998),
State of Mind (Sun & Moon,
1995), and a memoir Displeasures
of the Table (Sun & Moon,
2001).
Praise for In a
landscape of having to repeat
"Martha Ronk’s In
a landscape of having to repeat is
a collection of poetic meditations
on repetition. In these lean
verse and prose poems, Ronk
plays with how creatures of
habit (dutiful as we are to
necessary repetition [say,
bodily functions, memory] and
selective repetition [say,
watching TV]) attempt to repeat
once-and-only-once experiences
that cannot without difficulty
be repeated. The poems are
narrative and semi-narrative
views of landscapes, moving
toward, away from, and through
Ronk’s linguistic flora,
Freud’s dream theories,
Eva Hesse’s intentionally
deteriorating props and sculptures;
delightful.
"In
a landscape of having to repeat is
an addictively liberating,
poetic exploration of repetition
in familiar and new language.
We are honored to select Martha
Ronk. Word for word, right
down to the title askew and
the two poems of the same title,
Martha Ronk’s In
a landscape of having to repeat is
a delightful addition to our
literary canon."
--Merilene Murphy,
Timothy Liu, Susan McCabe, The
Written World, (Program
for the Pen USA 15th Annual Awards
Festival)
"Despite the poems'
unconditional indeterminacy and
economy of expression, Ronk's
sincere desire to comprehend
a reality that refuses to hold
still for analysis generates
an unexpected and uniquely human
warmth."
--Fred Muratori, Boston
Review
".her new book, In
a Landscape of Having to Repeat ,
is about landscapes: of the
mind, the body, the past, the
present, the possible, the
impossible, the knowable, the
unknowable, the sublime, and
the necessary."
--Mark Tursi, American
Book Review, Jan/Feb
2005
"As she states,
'Objects have no thoughts about
anything else.' Yet humans do,
and Ronk manufactures her unique
memory from that slippery stash
of the ordinary."
--Valerie Valentine, Rain
Taxi , vol.
9, No. 4, Winter 2004/2005
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