In her first book,\u00a0Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields<\/i>, Ashley Capps sounds like the voice of a fresh generation of poets, where the familiar turns suddenly elliptical, straight talk goes engagingly crooked, and the lyric negotiates with the matter-of-fact. Desperate for something solid to believe in, Capps still mistrusts authority, feeling disenchanted with God, family, eros, even her own impulsive self. And yet while the absence of faith hints at despair, these poems often achieve, almost in spite of themselves, an odd buoyancy. Playful, fearless, wary, there\u2019s a dazzling resilience in this book. One poem can make a grand and eccentric claim, \u201cI forgive the afterlife,\u201d while another takes as its title something humbler and more poisonous, \u201cGod Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake.\u201d No matter how adrift this poet may feel, poetry itself remains her anchor and lifeline.<\/p>\n
I love the scorching details of Ashley Capp\u2019s poems, as well as their withering honesty, their modesty, their crazy imagination, and their cunning. And I love their moral stance and their gracefulness. From time to time I feel that it\u2019s all been done and the new poets have nowhere to go, but then I come across a poet like this and I know the art is living. If I looked for a single adjective to describe her poems, I would come up with the word \u201ccourageous.\u201d She has already achieved a great deal.<\/i>
\n\u2014Gerald Stern<\/b><\/p>\n
Sometimes poetry is able to bring us the news of how people survive\u2014not necessarily through its content, but, as here, through its transformational means. Ashley Capps tackles the desolations of spirit and personal history with such astonishing vitality that the green tangle of music, sadness, and formal resourcefulness of this book seems not only redemptive, but heroic.<\/i>
\n\u2014Dean Young<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cWe are human & alone,\u201d reads the penultimate stanza of \u201cTo My Friend Grievous,\u201d \u201cbut someone \/ is playing a tambourine, yes, & a tuba.\u201d Everywhere in this brilliantly conceived and crafted debut collection, Ashley Capps shines her unique light on a world rich in paradox. Again and again these stunning poems give testament to Thomas Moore\u2019s famous dictum that the beast at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel. This book breaks my heart, even as it mends it.<\/i>
\n\u2014Cathy Smith Bowers<\/b><\/p>\nAbout the author<\/h3>\n