Public Works is poet Ronna Bloom's third collection of poetry. In it, several themes emerge: 1. The private experience of the public (the idea that everything we experience -- a book, a speech, a hospital, a religion, water running into the taps -- we experience privately) ;2. The public role of the poet (as in Ginsberg's lines: "While I'm here,I'll do the work/and what's the work?/To ease the pain of living"); and 3. The placement of the individual in a wider context (the places we findourselves inhabiting: a body, a house, a job, a memory, as in the common phrase on maps in shopping malls: "You Are Here".) Some poems address overlapping themes: physical location in a body, astreet, a city; and recognition of one's own response to the institutions or services found there. Bloom is interested in the way individuals move back and forth between and within the public/private landscape. These poems, moving through personal, physical and social realms, chart the uneven, uncertain trajectory of a life. About the Author: Ronna Bloom is the author of seven books of poetry. She has led initiatives to bring poetry into health care, developing the Poet in Residence program at Sinai Health. Ronna has collaborated with filmmakers, choreographers, and architects and in 2018, her poem "The City," was painted by PLANT Architects 35 meters wide on King Street in Toronto. Her recent book is A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an Introduction by Phil Hall (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2023). In 2025, In a Riptide will be published by Brick Books. www.ronnabloom.com |