Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea - Renée Ashley

Praise for Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea

In her new collection of prose poems, Renée Ashley reminds us what poems should be: as exacting, necessary, and ambitious in their fine music and muscular associations as they are in their emotions. And her poems remind us what we should be: vessels, like the heart, that are most resilient, most capable of moving and being moved, when they have no toughness in them at all. These are poems that disturb again and again the un-shut-able wounds of our humanity. They set our great grief and incomprehension against our small ordinary joys. In the face of that which we cannot change and that which we cannot call into being, this remarkable poet sings.

~ KATHLEEN GRABER

“Except for every thing we’re interchangeable,” writes Renée Ashley, humorously exposing the limberness of language to express insight in paradox, using words to bend understanding inside out. In tautly wrapped prose packages, Ashley makes lyric precision express the errancy in logic, and demonstrates how the real will trump our attempts to contain it, though we are endlessly tempted to try. “The rabbit was stew Hard not to wager abstraction after that.” With no periods to clarify the ends of sentences, she lets form remind us that nothing ends neatly, the way we’d like it to. These language vessels navigate a fecund privacy made eerily public, arriving with iconic force. Yet, “vessels” on their way to safe landings, they are not. As she tells us: even “call it a vessel…. And it sorries…. pipes all over the ark are breaking.” Uncanny is every glimpsed otherness, be it in the guise of “aborted” “twins,” or “crippled chipmunks” or the “ghost text appear[ing] in waves.” Does it trouble us? Does un-reason’s proximity confound? Clearly, if it does, the problem is our own, “the one-legged birds stand on their one leg The world is not broken The world is local Singing in its spinning dish” Come inside these poems, and you will hear it.

~ RUSTY MORRISON