Renee Ashley

Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea Renee Ashley

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