Week 30 Reading (2026) Martha Ronk & Vanessa Bell

Vertigo (Coffee House Press, 2007) is my first book of poems by Martha Ronk, and it won’t be my last. I picked it up because “some of the titles are revised forms of sentences from W.G. Sebald’s novels.” How could I resist? The speakers in Ronk’s poems are often in situations that they themselves don’t clearly understand, and it is to these moments that Ronk is repeatedly drawn. “When I told my story all over again, it no longer sounded / plausible, even to me.” Ronk conveys a sense of vertigo through sentences that make you think you must have missed an important piece of information somewhere. Or maybe it was just a missing word. The poem that starts out with talk about crossword puzzles is suddenly concerned with tidal charts, for example. By catching the mind at its most confused moment, when it is most vulnerable and open, Ronk exposes the odd truths that emerge when we are forced to make emergency landings. The miracle is that she finds ways for language to mimic these moments.…