Glass Grapes : and Other Stories
ISBN: 9781942683278
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / BOA Editions Ltd.
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Fiction; Literature;

Poet Ronk (Vertigo) is an elegant stylist who showcases her narrative wiles in this polished first collection. Often told from a tenuous, trance-like first-person point of view, these landscapes of estrangement explore relationships that are painfully evolving, interior-driven and often despairing. Cones traces the gradual unraveling of an affair based on storms and calms--she is the storms, he the calms--as he slowly withdraws, leaving nothing behind but a faint trace like a cone of less faded paint revealed after a piece of furniture is moved. The narrator of The Gift speculates on the success and failure of a seemingly perfect romance, while the daughter narrator in Their Calendar delineates the chilling uncommunicativeness of her newly retired parents. La Belle Dame is a particularly fine example of a narrator's awkward, rather endearing relation to the world around her: at a dinner party, she closely observes the hostess's husband, engrossed in his own rhapsody of thought, and recognizes how much she is like him. Ronk's delicate, nuanced renderings are exquisitely crafted and demand careful attention. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.

Martha Ronk is author of more than ten books and chapbooks. Her poetry collection, Vertigo (Coffee House Press, 2007), won the National Poetry Series Competition. In a Landscape of Having to Repeat (Omnidawn Press) won the PEN USA award for best poetry book, 2005. She is the Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College.

hidden image for function call