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 ones vision, bodily posture, vocabulary, and concern forto take one examplethe dwindling water supply in California. The bodys 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 ones 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 seaand 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.