The View from the Body

Poetry. Renee 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