Spectra

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Toliver's work has the generosity and intelligence of C.D. Wright's and Claudia Rankine's, both of whom were her teachers, and the exacting standards of form, meaning, and language of Dawn Lundy Martin's. One of the delights of Spectra is how it is maximal in content, and minimal in productionthese are razor sharp, almost clinically precise poems about a domestic spherethere's nothing soft-focus about them.

Reviews

Finalistfor the Believer Book Award in Poetry

Testing the bounds of relationships and identity, Toliver displays her linguistic gifts in poems that resist egotism and startle with their intimacy.Publishers Weekly,starred review

A powerful first book . . . a worthwhile collection. Massachusetts Review

This book embodies the tenderness with which we can, inside and above our own vulnerabilities and flaws, choose to observe our inevitable corporeal selves. Tarpulin Sky

Ashley Tolivers collection pushes at the elastic boundaries of the self, the domestic and natural worlds, revealing a porousness that could serve us well as an ethic rooted in connection.Little Infinite

Like hands running over a strange surface in a dark room, the language of Ashley Tolivers mesmerizing debut collection,Spectra,is constantlysearchingthe 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 linkedseries 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. Tolivers innovative, open forms and imploring phrases accommodate the linked intricacies of mothering and loss. While readingSpectraI was reminded that feeling ones way through the unknown can itself become a kind of unparalleled knowing.Claudia Rankine

Here is a book full of careful attention to what has been called the natural world, how it begins in the poets own body, ravels into a house, a marriage, and extends out into the continents. Like those of Bishops mapmakers, Ashley Tolivers colors are more delicate than the historians. They are also certain, meticulous, andit must be saidjust absolutely beautiful. ReadingSpectramakes me feel like Toliver has stitched a new constellation into my mind; she has written that much dark, that much light.Heather Christle, author ofHeliopause

Author Bio

Ashley Toliver is the author of the chapbook Ideal Machine<./i>. 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.