In Wild Juice, the poet and novelist Ashley Mace Havird confronts global and personal change. Her subjects range from the extinction of a prehuman species to the present-day reduction in sea life due to the climate crisis. Closer to home, she confronts the death of her father and her own aging. Running throughout these lyrics of loss is the richness of communal life, a current of hope given substance by the juice of wild grapes that baptizes the poet?s chin and that of her elderly father, whose presence haunts the book. Havird?s poems move from sea coasts to the rural South to landlocked suburbia, in language characterized by wit, pluck, and ironic candor. Through striking evocations of the natural world, conveyed in a voice steeped in mature human experience, Wild Juice speaks memorably on behalf of a life that embraces us all.

Wild Juice: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Havird, Ashley Mace

Poetry

LSU Press

In May of 1964, eleven-year-old Etta McDaniel's horse is struck by lightning--dead and gone, she hopes--out of her life "as though he'd never come in the first place, bringing with him one catastrophe after another." But Troy, gruesomely scarred, not only survives but seems to have gained supernatural powers, which Etta sets her mind on harnessing in her search for treasure. She is convinced that a find of the sort her hero Heinrich Schliemann unearthed at ancient Troy will set to rights everything suddenly gone wrong in her life: rivalry and betrayal at home and social unrest reaching even her family's farm.
Half-blind and crippled, the horse does lead Etta to treasure--though not to the treasure she dreamed of. Along with her shell-shocked grandfather, the family's African American housekeeper, and the widow of a Mohawk chief, the lightning-struck horse initiates her into the world of "action and liability" as the Civil Rights Movement takes hold in her rural South.
Etta comes to understand that this world was never perfect, with its economy dependent on tobacco and before that on slavery, as excavations on the farm reveal. Once unearthed, the ugly truths of history scar Etta and set her, in a figurative sense, upon the back of the lightning-scarred horse and on the journey of her life.

Lightningstruck

Literary

Mercer University Press

An Ivorybill in Arkansas, which human guilt has conjured up from extinction; mud daubers toting “stunned spiders” to their nests on a screened porch in Louisiana; a whale shark off the Yucatan whose spots tell its story in indecipherable Braille; conchs harvested from an undersea garden in the Caymans; stray dogs in Athens, ancient gods in disguise―the lives of these creatures and others entwine with ours in The Garden of the Fugitives. Loosely based on the story of Eve, this collection of poems takes the reader from Eden into a fallen world. Exploring the tense relationships between women and men, mothers and daughters, and human beings and other species, these poems lead to Pompeii’s memorial to the “ash people” in The Garden of the Fugitives, where parents and children, inside their husks of plaster, never stop dying to the singing of bees. WISTERIA Oozing perfume, the vine kills exquisitely in such high style. The trees have no idea what’s happening to them.

Garden of the Fugitives: Poems

Texas Review Press

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