Finalist for 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 Toliver’s 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 Toliver’s mesmerizing debut collection, Spectra, is constantly searching—the 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 linked series 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. Toliver’s innovative, open forms and imploring phrases accommodate the linked intricacies of mothering and loss. While reading Spectra I was reminded that feeling one’s 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 poet’s own body, ravels into a house, a marriage, and extends out into the continents. Like those of Bishop’s mapmakers, Ashley Toliver’s colors are ‘more delicate than the historians.’ They are also certain, meticulous, and—it must be said—just absolutely beautiful. Reading Spectra makes me feel like Toliver has stitched a new constellation into my mind; she has written that much dark, that much light.” —Heather Christle, author of Heliopause
