The Place One Is

In her 12th book of poems (following Silences), the National Book Award longlisted Ronk captures the present moment by juxtaposition, as exemplified in a poem describing the earth now (“a fusion with a wind-shaped tree”) vs. the earth in the future (“by 2050 30% of the inhabitable earth may well be desert.”) She often achieves her effect by breaking the rules of syntax, making her poetry one of run-on sentences, enjambment, dangling modifiers, and lack of punctuation. At times, she uses a sonnet-like pattern, connecting a longer stanza with a shorter one often fashioned from a quote that comments on what went before, adding another layer of metaphor; “Reflection,” for instance, ends with a pithy quote from Henry David Thoreau. In the end, reading these poems is reminiscent of looking into a kaleidoscope until one sees a pattern emerge.