Renee Ashley describes" Salt "as an attempt, in part, to mythologize a period of the 1950s and early 1960s in the California Bay Area suburb where she grew up, "a racially rich, economically varied section of town east of El Camino Real--the major road and the 'tracks', so to speak, that one grew up on the right or wrong side of." Many of the poems in the collection explore Ashley's adjustment to the East Coast after a virtual lifetime in "that one place." They deal with landscape, with marriage, with the insight distance seems to lend to hindsight, with amusement, with regret. "Renee...
Renee Ashley describes" Salt "as an attempt, in part, to mythologize a period of the 1950s and early 1960s in the California Bay Area suburb where ...
" Basic Heart" is a primer on the emotional topography of the human heart, its complexities and fluctuations, its nuances and metaphors. From tropes grounded in the fantastic landscapes of awareness, of desire and despair, Ashley draws us a map of a world and shows us just how that "world is turned like a pig on a spit." She brings us back to the recognition that we are all ordinary, that sometimes we need saving, and that "what is saved just might turn beautiful."
" Basic Heart" is a primer on the emotional topography of the human heart, its complexities and fluctuations, its nuances and metaphors. From tropes g...
"In Renee Ashley's poems, all parts of speech behave as verbs, each one freighted with desire. Hers is work abuzz with existence, action, and occurrence."--Kathy Fagan, final judge of the New American Press Spring 2009 Chapbook Contest.
"In Renee Ashley's poems, all parts of speech behave as verbs, each one freighted with desire. Hers is work abuzz with existence, action, and occurren...
