Slow States of Collapse
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About this ebook
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.
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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