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Slow States of Collapse
Slow States of Collapse
Slow States of Collapse
Ebook100 pages33 minutes

Slow States of Collapse

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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 both 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.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherECW Press
Release dateApr 1, 2016
ISBN9781770908796
Slow States of Collapse

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    Book preview

    Slow States of Collapse - Ashley-Elizabeth Best

    SLOW STATES of COLLAPSE

    Poems

    ASHLEY-ELIZABETH BEST

    For Grandma and Papa

    Contents

    Going East

    Old Ontario

    If You Were Thinking About Cheating

    Bee Dance

    The Arborist

    I’d Like to Be the Subject of Your Neck Tattoo

    Storming the Sprawl

    After Church, We Visit

    Arthropod Navigation

    Under Alder

    Wintering

    Leaving by Train

    Erratics

    Small Tree, Grow

    Toad

    The Great Hag

    The Hot and the Bitter

    Courtdate

    The Still

    Wreck Cove, Cape Breton

    Growing Up

    10 Minute Frostbite Warning

    Capture

    Aristophanes’s Clouds

    If It Be a Girl, Expose It

    Dinner Party

    Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff

    In Kind

    Prostitutes Holding Puppies, Gathered for a Drinking Bee in the White Chapel District of Dawson City, Yukon, c. 1898

    The Type of Women Men Should Reject When Choosing a Life Partner

    Someone on the Shore

    Morning After the Field Party

    Body Work

    Heir Apparent

    Looking Out for No One

    Looking Out for No One

    I Seek

    Lunch in the Park

    For Which He Still Suffers

    A Dead Body Is Entirely Anatomy

    After the Head Injury

    That Numbness I Can’t Place

    Living in the Wait

    Theories of Animal Memory

    Hospital

    Presenting Complaint

    Procedures/Investigations

    Findings

    Endometriosis

    Healthy Husband, Ill Wife

    Night Nurse

    Reruns

    I’m Not Your Cool Girlfriend

    You Don’t Know What I Look Like When I’m Not in Love with You

    You Don’t Know What I Look Like When I’m Not in Love with You

    Not Your Girl

    Flying Pigeon, Frozen Wire

    Us, A Couple Years On

    Algonquin Suite

    I’ll Be the One You’ll Never Want

    Leaving Alberta

    I Don’t Know What I Deserve

    How to Recognize a Wolf in the Forest

    To Know About the Fire

    Acknowledgements

    About the Author

    GOING EAST

    For five days we lived in

    some slow state of collapse

    even the North

    Saskatchewan River

    could not carry away.

    Voice hitching, my sister recalls

    hair unspun

    across my lap.

    I feel the Braille of her spine,

    hold the trail of her wrist.

    We waited out the prairies,

    exposed in the bud of our country’s

    sleep. Safe is not this smooth —

    we wanted enclosure, felt

    the fear until tolled to sleep.

    Held by the bloom of green,

    the dead tent pole trees,

    bearded streams, and deer

    abundant in their calm stride

    we crossed the Ontario

    border, drank in the last hail

    of lights’ thick mass.

    Northern babies us. My birth kin —

    my sister beside me, the bus

    hugging Superior, sliding its

    curve south,

    though they call this

    going east.

    OLD ONTARIO

    I lead you to the country

    by hand,

    old Ontario flushed

    by settler-planted lilacs,

    your careless palm,

    our better ways of stalling.

    Your eyes find

    graves uncomfortably hill-perched.

    The evening’s coming down,

    lousy conjurer of shadows,

    echoes of sky.

    Various greens thirst under

    the blue moon, our intent

    cold

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