Noise through the window or a door. The smell 
of the young neighbor’s brisket: one’s whole life spills 
like piss jars, like calendars of train cars 
as if such traveling were a name simply called 
or recalled. Something said badly. Something 
shed like a coat or a past. And it’s only when 
a scarf, then a blouse blow past her window 
easy as the geese she saw once on the lake 
that she turns on the radio. 

Renée Ashley

Lives in northern New Jersey and is on the core faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-residency graduate programs, the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in Creative Writing and Literature for Educators. She’s the author of five volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea (Subito Press Book Prize); as well as two chapbooks and a novel, Someplace Like This.

A portion of her poem “First Book of the Moon” is etched in marble in Penn Station Terminal in Manhattan, part of a permanent installation by the artist Larry Kirkland. She has received a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships in both poetry and prose from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts.

reneeashley.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Field Guide to Prose Poetry and The Art of the Poetic Line, review/ essay in The Literary Review (Volume 54, Issue 2: “The Rogue Idea”)

⚡ WRUR Interview #6: Renée Ashley, Author of Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea by poet Matthew Thorburn (5 July 2012); includes two poems from the book

⚡ Interview with Poet Renée Ashley by Michael T. Young in The Inner Music (16 May 2012)

⚡ Bunny Noir: a tale of cheese, patés, mousses, and a tough-guy biker dancing with the Easter Bunny (in Writers on the Job: Series 1, 2005)

Steve Davenport

Author of the poetry collections, Overpass and Uncontainable Noise; and two chapbooks, Murder on Gasoline Lake (originally published in Black Warrior Review and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2007), and Nine Poems and Three Fictions (available in The Literary Review’s Summer 2008 chapbook issue).

A story in The Southern Review earned him a Special Mention in Pushcart Prizes 2011. In June 2012, Massachusetts Review published three installments from his “Black Guy Bald Guy” series of fictions.

Author’s website: www.gasolinelake.com

Author’s Faculty Page at the University of Illinois