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SALT
Winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry
The University of Wisconsin
Press
ISBN 0-299-13144-0
"What a wonderful debut
for Renée Ashley. She's so immediately and clearly her own
poet. Her poems are full of a sensuality that is as gritty
as it is idiosyncratic. 'Salt,' the powerful title poem,
separates her from almost everybody in her generation."
—
Stephen Dunn
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The Various Reasons
of Light Avocet
Press
ISBN 0-9661073-1-7
"In Renée Ashley's
remarkable new collection, her delicate meditations are lit
by the steady —if solitary— flame of the human spirit. These
poems celebrate the most ephemeral aspects of human desires
and aspirations as the volume moves toward what the poet
calls, with typical grace, the profound 'generosity of
souls.' Like a secular prayer book, this collection
illumines our apprehensions of the encroaching dark with the
fierce exigencies of (divine) light; their conflict, if not
mortal, is clearly moral. In this wise and deeply consoling
book, every angel grows necessary."
—David St. John
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The Revisionist's Dream
Avocet Press
ISBN 0-9705049-2-6
"Ms Ashley reminds us with
a sweet succinctness that originality has to do with what is
very old, with origins indeed, in order to have much truck
with the NEW—always a doubtful proposition. The dreams
she attributes to her Revisionist are indeed the ordering of
ancient visions, made new with a full heart, a clear mind."
—Richard Howard |
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The Museum of Lost Wings
Winner of the Sunken Garden
Poetry PrizeHill-Stead Museum,
Farmington, CT
ISBN 0-9744245-5-2
"In The Museum of Lost
Wings, Renée Ashley realizes, with one of her alter egos,
'That she has no wings. That she too must fly.' and
she does. Not quite so isolate as Emily Dickinson, Ashley
explores the similarly deep territory of the self, or
selves; the poems alternate between first, second, and third
persons as the poet, much like Dickinson ... The joy, for the
reader, is often in the language; these are poems in which
all words count, and many surprise. Tight, resonant,
lyrical, edgy, marked by paradox and reversals of linguistic
expectation, they are poems that might themselves be called,
in the words of one of Ashley's titles, Such Threads of
Light as Exist in Deep Pools."
—Martha Collins, Final Judge |
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Basic Heart
Winner of the 2008 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize
Texas Review Press
Texas A&M University Press Consortium
ISBN 978-1-933896-28-1
"With great originality
and authority, and with a sense of high-wired, artistic
risk, Renée Ashley's Basic Heart offers us new kinds of
songs for our broken-down age. Even if you took away her
spicy chutzpah, her work would still stand out for its
brisk, crisp voice, big heart, and colorful intelligence.
She's nervous and edgy and eagle-eyed. She's the real thing."
— Jack Myers, Series Judge |
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THE VERBS OF DESIRING
Winner of the new american press Chapbook Prize
new american
press
ISBN 978-0-9817802-5-2
"VERB: that part of speech
that expresses existence, action or occurrence. In
Renée Ashley's poems, all parts of speech behave as verbs,
each one freighted with desire. Hers is work abuzz with
existence, action, and occurrence. I love the
surprising textural variety here, the heady music. Via
linguistic experiment and complex emotional investigation,
Ashley has created a poetry possessing vivid, necessary
knowledge."
—Kathy Fagan |
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BECAUSE I AM THE SHORE I
WANT TO BE THE SEA
Winner of the Subito Press Book Prize
Subito Press
ISBN 978-0-9831150-8-3
"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 |
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THE VIEW FROM THE BODY
Black Lawrence Press
ISBN 978-1-62557-955-3 $15.95
"Renée
Ashley’s stunning new book is indeed a 'view from the body,'
but it’s a 'body named / bone, named brain.' Haunted at
times by the dead, by the past, by death itself, Ashley
finds her most frequent specter in the self and its
disturbances, which few poets since Dickinson have explored
so unflinchingly. Language is the means of both exploration
and transcendence: words burst into double meanings, invent
themselves, and reverse our linguistic expectations, carried
throughout by the musical exuberance of consonant and vowel.
Taut, resonant, lyrical, edgy, these poems are, as one title
has it, 'Such Threads of Light As Exist in Deep Pools.'”
—Martha Collins |
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