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9781632431677

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“These poems seem to ‘pass through another body with cloud-like ease,’ as they reveal the movement from skin to world, lump of clay to wall, from pot shard to bone. Their intimate exchanges with touch bring us back to our senses, where we feel the empty space and the vessel itself, the way language holds meaning, beautifully moving us to “the not-yet-conceived/thought of the under leaf.”     -- Eleni Sikelianos “What is a bowl? A vase? Any thrown vessel? Is it not, above all, an envelope for emptiness? And what is it, then, to leave that vessel empty? The courage of emptiness—to welcome it, to plumb it, and above all, to feel it with the fingertips—drives this hybrid text in which memoir, quotation, and gorgeous lyricism track a network of inter-cultural traditions all based on clay. Ronk finds an aerial lightness in this famously heavy material while simultaneously, through it, celebrating the weight of the world.”     -- Cole Swensen “In this vibrant encomium to fragility and what endures, Martha Ronk engages the practice of pottery, an ‘ancient material language, each letter felt by hand.’ Like Morandi, whose presence is vivid here, Ronk has a deep, abiding respect for objects in their unfolding, as they ‘extend beyond’ and ‘darkly through,’ their textures curved ‘around the zero of air.’ Admixed with citations and still-life photographs, Clay is a meditation on being and touch, reminding us that ‘human’ and ‘earth’ emerge from a single root. A projective verse of the body and wheel, of tenmoku and celadon, this book spins lyrically inwardly, desirous of “holding emptiness itself.”   -- Andrew Zawacki

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Martha Ronk is the author of thirteen books of poetry, a memoir, and a collection of short stories, Glass Grapes. Her books include The Place One Is, A Myth of Ariadne, Silences, Ocular Proof, Transfer of Qualities (longlisted for the National Book Award), and in a landscape of having to repeat. Her work has been included in the anthologies Lyric Postmodernisms, American Hybrid, Not for Mothers Only, and most recently in North American Women Poets in the 21st Century. She is the emeritus Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles.  

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