Desire in L.A. - (Contemporary Poetry) by Martha Clare Ronk (Paperback)

About the Book

Desire in L.A. confronts limitless longing in a city that is itself without limits. In these poems, the object of desire is decidedly missing, whether that object be love or beauty or the past. They move from thwarted examples of family and place to language and its corruptions, from emotionality to artifice.

Book Synopsis

Desire in L.A. confronts limitless longing in a city that is itself without limits. In these poems, the object of desire is decidedly missing, whether that object be love or beauty or the past.

Shifting even within a single poem, and certainly from section to section, the objects of desire in Martha Ronk's poetry become as elusive as the unnamed Marilyn Monroe--"that image of another's skirts"--of the title poem, or the moment captured in "A photograph as good as a picture"

"He leans forward with such / fervor, yet isn't young and something / decidedly is happening, even / to the beefy fellow in his white / short-sleeved shirt. A photograph-- / oh, perhaps not the same as a / Manet, but it is Auden, and / for whatever reason he stares at / the square flesh neckline / of her dress. He is forward / in his chair, rumpled about / the collar and everyone is wearing / black and white. It is the formal / occasion of how much he cares / to be there, Venice, 1951 / and how much I care to see him / no matter what for, longing / like that."

Moving from thwarted examples of family and place to language and its corruptions, from classical Japanese love poems to failed love in the southwestern desert, from emotionality to artifice, the book ends with a series focused on the slipperiness of all categories.

From the Back Cover

Desire in L.A. confronts limitless longing in a city that is itself without limits. In these poems, the object of desire is decidedly missing, whether that object be love or beauty of the past.

Review Quotes

In Ronk's work the hunger for the open, for landscape that has not been read over and so is a fit object to the imagination, this hunger meets the imperative of form, and locus of the confrontation is the sentence. . . . Desire in L.A. is an inventive and disturbing book.

--Black Warrior Review

About the Author

MARTHA CLARE RONK is the author of seven books of poetry, including Eyetrouble and Desire in L. A. (both Georgia). She is the Irma and Jay Price Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles.