Neogothicism, the surrealist snapshot, feminist Western and post-modern parable are just some of the elements that feed Gil Adamson’s second collection of poems. Adamson creates a world fully awash in violence and history, the absurdities of the frontier and the gorgeous terrors of death. Everything is simple, yet nothing is as it seems. Moving easily from prose poem to lyric, verbal portrait to improbable biography, Ashland leads readers on a macabre tour of their nightmares, perverse secrets and death-focused mythologies.