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Poetry Canadian

Slow States of Collapse

by (author) Ashley-Elizabeth Best

Publisher
ECW Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2016
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781770413191
    Publish Date
    Apr 2016
    List Price
    $18.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781770908796
    Publish Date
    Apr 2016
    List Price
    $17.99

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

 

The eagerly anticipated debut from one of Canada’s most exciting new poets

In her debut collection, Ashley-Elizabeth Best explores the cultivation of resilience during uncertain and often trying times. It’s a book built around day-to-day conflicts — poems about love, family, grief, power, and longing. Navigating the fault lines of popular culture and traditional poetry to assert that we are all history makers, Slow States of Collapse enters the landscape of personal narrative in an attempt to reconcile life’s little universal griefs.

Slow States of Collapse presents a world that is at once menacing and full of wonder and grace. It’s a poetry of “casual cruelty” and “kisses like / puncture wounds,” of “something too tender to touch” and “the threat of an intense beauty.” In this collection, illness confronts bedside manners while a migrant restlessness also paints remarkable portraits of shifting self-image, and in the process the nature of personal and political power is reimagined.

 

About the author

Contributor Notes

Ashley-Elizabeth Best is from Cobourg, Ontario. Her work has appeared in Fjords, CV2, Berfrois, Grist, and Ambit Magazine, among other publications. Recently, she was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario.

Editorial Reviews

 

“Today's Book of Poetry simply loved this hard charging, take no prisoners, bridge no bullshit, go down swinging marvel of a book.” — Today’s Book of Poetry