Spectra - Softcover

Toliver, Ashley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156689526X ISBN 13: 9781566895262

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2018

Synopsis

These generous, penetrating, relentlessly sonic poems record the creative potential of the body and the boundaries of the self. Maximal in content and minimal in production, Spectra is razor-sharp in its interrogation of the domestic sphere. The thud and drone of language evokes the suffocation of a marriage gone sour with a sound that bounces back, creating patterns that are an inhibiting force in themselves. There's a pulse to her poems, one that harnesses the energy on the page to transcend binaries and boundaries of the self. There's nothing soft-focus about them.

Ashley Toliver is the author of the chapbook Ideal Machine. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts, Cave Canem, and the Academy of American Poets. She received her MFA from Brown University in 2013.

About this title

About the Author

Ashley Toliver is the author of the chapbook Ideal Machine. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts, Cave Canem, and the Academy of American Poets. She received her MFA from Brown University in 2013.

Review

"In her radiant debut, Toliver carefully explores domesticity, medical trauma, and the profound limitations of having a body. Divided into three sections, the book opens with revelatory images of light that spark a phenomenological query into the nature of perception... Testing the bounds of relationships and identity, Toliver displays her linguistic gifts in poems that resist egotism and startle with their intimacy." - Publisher's Weekly, starred review

"Like hands running over a strange surface in a dark room, the language of Ashley Toliver's mesmerizing debut collection, Spectra, is constantly searching--the phrases, logics, and images coalescing only to disperse and transmogrify: 'I say to the dark / look / everything is turning / into everything else / moth shuttled inside / an empty glass / paper slid over the mouth.' In 'Housekeeping,' the linked series of prose poems that run through the first half of the book, the poems take on a dioramic quality, tableaux vivants marrying the domestic interiors of a life with the natural world. Toliver's innovative, open forms and imploring phrases accommodate the linked intricacies of mothering and loss. While reading Spectra I was reminded that feeling one's way through the unknown can itself become a kind of unparalleled knowing." - Claudia Rankine 

"Ashley Toliver's Spectra is a book of poetry that thinks like a book of useful philosophy. Or, as Toliver herself writes, 'I am thinking of the mother who drowned / her three boys, why she stopped first / to undress them.' Toliver wields words as if they are on fire. The violences of this beautifully necessary book get cooled and contained by Toliver's wish for formal variety and by her own formal dexterity. Still, each of these poems sees into the possibility of how any relationship can have in it something that cuts, something that burns. And almost as if to prove her lovely theorems, there is a brilliant poem here titled, 'Standing on the Lawn Outside Your House with a Match and a Gallon of Gasoline.' I am in awe of this book." - Jericho Brown 

"Here is a book full of careful attention to what has been called the natural world, how it begins in the poet's own body, ravels into a house, a marriage, and extends out into the continents. Like those of Bishop's mapmakers, Ashley Toliver's colors are 'more delicate than the historians.' They are also certain, meticulous, and--it must be said--just absolutely beautiful. Reading Spectra makes me feel like Toliver has stitched a new constellation into my mind; she has written that much dark, that much light." - Heather Christle 

"Moving, challenging, and filled with light, Ashley Toliver's Spectra is a wonderful new volume of poetry." - Scott Simon, NPR Weekend Edition

About this edition

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 156689526X
• ISBN 13: 9781566895262
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 80