Museum of Distance

Poetry. This stunning debut collection links images and observations that absolutely claim their moments, nudging the reader into a persistent sense of mystery, possibility, and sometimes the tease of threat. In the tradition of Magic Realism, it blurs the boundaries between the quotidian and the fantastic, stretching and blending, until the reader might well wonder, ‘I know where I’ve landed, but how did I get here?’ Kramer’s poems have extraordinary authority; every sentence is shapely and urgent, every passage exquisitely textured, every provocation earned and convincing. It is impossible, then, to resist or question a single one of their flights.–Leslie Ullman

MUSEUM OF DISTANCE is an Ovidian adventure, in which thousands of images play a kind of dream-tag, each one prompting the next. Though flashes of autobiography appear occasionally, the book is very far from the typical stories-from-my-life collection. Instead, Ashley Seitz Kramer is committed to evoking the fungibility of experience as processed by imagination. ‘I made my own bicycle / from cereal boxes…I made a photograph from broken seashells. / I made a bat-house from orange peels.’ Kramer’s world is akin to the world of Dean Young–a world in which everything is changing before you know it. Kramer’s poems are like seeds–‘each with a desire to sprout, each with genuine thirst.’–Mark Halliday