Glass Grapes
and Other Stories
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Glass Grapes and Other Stories is the first full-length collection of short stories by distinguished poet and fiction writer Martha Ronk. Ronk’s work has garnered critical accolades and numerous awards, including, most recently, a 2005 PEN USA Award in poetry, a 2007 NEA Fellowship, and a 2007 National Poetry Series Award. Glass Grapes is a collection of short, experimental stories, usually dominated by an object imbued with fetishistic qualities by an obsessive, self-involved narrator. The language of these stories is repetitive, provocative, imagistic, occasionally comic, and unnerving. Ronk’s fiction moves with the same grace, beauty, and attention to language as her most accomplished poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
