Why/Why Not: Volume 8

by Martha Ronk

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520238117
• ISBN13: 9780520238114
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 104 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

The Swirling Beauty of Ronk's "Why/Why Not"

Martha Ronk dazzles us with the swirling beauty of her poetry in "Why/Why Not." In Hamlet-like questioning, her lines blend, break and turn on themselves in ways that startle, surprise and shock. In "Anticipation," she begins: "Anticipation stood at attention through the entire scene/what else was there to do but lean/as a dancer before lift." And then the sock between the eyes: "Something was bound to occur." But no, because "whatever he did/to hold time at bay or move it backwards/was what she also said about whether or not/she could stay the same if she didn't lift a finger/and if he'd keep on speaking there'd be no finale/and he'd hold still the April of his prime." In "That subject again," she complains of how death (that subject) intrudes with companions, a "three-headed dog/chain smoking barflies/and all that whirled-about smoke." You will want to read and re-read these poems; Ronk's language will get under your skin leaving you with desperate, simple, yet unanswerable questions.