Why/Why Not (New California Poetry) (First Edition)

Ronk, Martha

ISBN 10: 0520236238 / ISBN 13: 9780520236233

Published by University of California Press, 2003

About this Item

Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2003. First edition. First printing. Hardcover. Fine/issued without jacket. A new clean, tight copy. Shipped in well-padded box. Smoke-free shop.

Seller Inventory # POETRY-01

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Why/Why Not (New California Poetry) (First Edition)
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520236238
• ISBN 13: 9780520236233
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Martha Ronk is Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College. Among her books are Eyetrouble (1998), State of Mind (1995), and Displeasures of the Table (2001).