Pride of Place Poems

In her debut collection, Martha Golensky explores the many meanings we attach to the word place, from a rented house that becomes a weekend home to a church that offers its congregants more than just a stirring sermon to a city in a foreign land that allows a troubled soul to start anew. Place also refers to particular spots or parts of the body. Each poem features a tapestry of rich physical details, thus painting a vivid word picture, as though the reader were in that very setting along with the poet. This collection, by acknowledging the impact of the memories we attach to the places we've visited or experienced, often takes us on an unexpected emotional journey, perhaps to relive a cherished excursion with a long-gone parent or recall the bittersweet taste of a doomed love affair or suffer a painful encounter with man's ultimate cruelty at a former Nazi prison camp. Because the poems have been organized in a quasi-chronological order, the overall and lasting impression is of a full and eclectic life.