Renée Ashley describes Salt as an attempt, in part, to mythologize a period of the 1950s and early 1960s in the California Bay Area suburb where she grew up, “a racially rich, economically varied section of town east of El Camino Real—the major road and the ‘tracks’, so to speak, that one grew up on the right or wrong side of.”  Many of the poems in the collection explore Ashley’s adjustment to the East Coast after a virtual lifetime in “that one place.”  They  deal with landscape, with marriage, with the insight distance seems to lend to hindsight, with amusement, with regret. “Renée Ashley can tune our ears to the thoughts of a wounded sparrow, to the sibilance of snow on stone, even to the song rocks make as they thaw in spring.  .  .  .  She wakes us to an intricate, enthralling world behind, beneath, beyond the one we thought we knew, alive with particulars, laced with compassion, luminous with humor.”—Donald Finkel

Salt (Brittingham Prize in Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Ashley, Renée

Poetry

Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Renée Ashley describes Salt as an attempt, in part, to mythologize a period of the 1950s and early 1960s in the California Bay Area suburb where she grew up, “a racially rich, economically varied section of town east of El Camino Real—the major road and the ‘tracks’, so to speak, that one grew up on the right or wrong side of.” Many of the poems in the collection explore Ashley’s adjustment to the East Coast after a virtual lifetime in “that one place.” They deal with landscape, with marriage, with the insight distance seems to lend to hindsight, with amusement, with regret. “Renée Ashley can tune our ears to the thoughts of a wounded sparrow, to the sibilance of snow on stone, even to the song rocks make as they thaw in spring. . . . She wakes us to an intricate, enthralling world behind, beneath, beyond the one we thought we knew, alive with particulars, laced with compassion, luminous with humor.”—Donald Finkel

Salt (Volume 1991) (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

University of Wisconsin Press

The Various Reasons of Light

Avocet Pr Inc

Kathy Fagan, final judge of the New American Press Spring 2009 Chapbook Contest: "In Renee 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."

The Verbs of Desiring

New American Press

Poetry. Winner of the Subito Book Prize, selected by Ruth Ellen Kocher. In BECAUSE I AM THE SHORE I WANT TO BE THE SEA, Ashley's fifth full-length collection, her narrator, through highly compressed, lyrical prose poems, engages in what she calls the "imperfect discourse of an unfinished world." These poems use syntactic ambiguity and metaphor to compress the philosophical observation of a life into image and back out again; underlying narratives are often denuded of literal action and grounded allusively; they are poems that evoke feeling but not sentiment, story but not history."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."—Rusty Morrison

Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea

Subito Press

Poems, rutabagas, charm school, webs, drowning, depression, on particular Puritan preacher, a mother, the Easter Bunny, flatulence, a duck decoy, brass stanchions, leftovers, paintings, dogs, aging, ghosts, not-ghosts, criticism, questions, answers, and memory. For Renée Ashley, everything's connected, and so Minglements comes forth in rays of entanglements, some hilarious, some not so hilarious at all. This collection is a kind of guided tour through the way a mind works. Now, when people ask Ashley, What planet do you live on? she can hold up this book in response.

Minglements: Prose on Poetry and Life

Essays & Correspondence

Del Sol Press

"…Tomorrow is our anniversary. Tomorrow we have been married at least one thousand years." How does a woman move from one life to another? Can she? In this lyrical and often very funny novel, thirty-seven year old Dore Dover searches for answers both in the familiar territories of old friendships and the mapless terrain of marriage. 
What hope can there be for a woman who says aloud, "I drag that old life with me like a dead cat in a sack"? 
"It has been pointed out to me that I am undefined, that I don't know what I want, and that this is my whole problem. It is entirely probable. If I knew what I wanted, I'd just go get it. But as it is, I don't know, and so here I sit on this damp stoop, outside a house we no longer own, leaving, with a husband whom, it is quite probable, I do not love, to go live in a rather isolated area, which, some time ago, gave me a great deal of pleasure. 
"I am too old for this…" 
Dore takes on the world and herself in this first novel by acclaimed poet Renée Ashley. While the ground is shifting beneath her, Dore discovers what her truths might be in the troubled places within herself.

Someplace Like This

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

Permanent Pr Pub Co

 Basic Heart is a primer on the emotional topography of the human heart, its complexities and fluctuations, its nuances and metaphors. From tropes grounded in the fantastic landscapes of awareness, of desire and despair, Ashley draws us a map of a world and shows us just how that "world is turned like a pig on a spit." She brings us back to the recognition that we are all ordinary, that sometimes we need saving, and that "what is saved just might turn beautiful."  

Basic Heart: Poems

Self-Help

Relationships

Texas Review Press

Poetry. RUINED TRAVELER is a collection built on the premise of tension and association. Prose poems are compressed within rigid margins to heighten pressure on the language, short poems explode from the right margin, and long segmented poems ("Ruined Traveler" and "from Her Book of Difficulties") are interwoven throughout the work, creating cross-poem conversations. Somehow, this dreamy mix stays grounded by a strict commitment to form. Ashley's collection sheds light on a troubling shadow world for the reader to enter, find a place to stand, and enjoy the show.

Ruined Traveler

Otis Books | Seismicity Editions

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Books by Ashley, Renée