The Place One Is

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 recognisable 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.

In the first part of the collection, the poems focus on a rural landscape, and in the second part, they consider the overly bright urban world of Los Angeles.