Books by Martha Ronk

"The poems in the book attempt to locate the slippery presence of silence in paintings and photographs, in the absences of bird sound, in ruin, pauses, and grief, and in the opaqueness of others and oneself. They address both the destruction behind some kinds of silence and the revitalizing possibilities in silent contemplation"--

Transfer of Qualities addresses the uncanny and myriad ways in which people and things, but also people and those around them, exchange qualities with one another, moving in on, unsettling: altering stance, attitude, mood, gesture.

Why/Why Not presents a speaker caught in quandaries created by changing perspectives, fervors, and locales. Why do we act one way here and another there; why can't a mind stay made up; why do we hate and love at the same time; why does memory fade or insist; why does the ordinary seem so uncanny? These questions are captured in lines that collide and merge, in irreverent and offhand jibes, and in plaintive repetitions.Why/Why Not moves across a vivid terrain-the stage of Hamlet, Phillip Marlowe's Los Angeles, Prague, paintings and gardens-to push through a tangle of ways to make sense of the world. Martha Ronk's poetic language is that of the everyday slightly skewed, as if pieces of an ordinary sentence were missing. Ronk's poems use the repetitive and the banal to explore ways in which language is intertwined with thought and experience.