PRAISE FOR "LOADING A NEW CONTINENT"
Reading Ashley Cline's poetry is like suddenly experiencing a strong consciousness in the middle of driving on the highway: a feeling you haven’t felt since you were seven, before you already had too many reference points of mountains to be surprised by one. It’s not a return to form, it’s a return to richness in language—and making our melancholic hearts smile. "loading a new continent" reminds us to feast on the gardens of wildflowers by the side of the road. It also reminds us what we have, what we've inherited, and that "not everything can float." Cline has given me a gift with these words: a guide to the Anthropocene.
–Gardner Dorton, author of "If I Were God I Would Also Start With Light"
At Earth’s funeral, Ashley Cline sits beside it's body of soil and root and examines the ways we have hurried along its death lamenting our losses: leaves that “kiss god,” “magic lilies” that “show their sleight of hand to the audience,” “moss on a drainage spout,” and the “January daffodils” that make her speaker nervous because they come too early. In loading a new continent, nature is a prayer, is praying, as it gives up its ghost and “even in [its] death,” says the speaker, “I am embarrassed,” caught with peach flesh in their teeth, not praying but enjoying Earth’s fruits. This is a long funeral, a body dying slowly—breath in, breath out—still offering its pleasures to the living.
–Kimberly Ann Priest, winner of the 2024 Backwater’s Press Prize in Poetry for "Wolves in Shells"
We live in a time that often mistakes brute volume for surety. How refreshing, then, to find a work so deeply attuned to the quiet, the silent, the ordinary, where "even the moss / on the drainage spout" holds emotion, where we look not at divinity but the “spiders [who] cling to the legs / of new gods.” Magnified by attention, what lurks on the lower frequencies becomes symphonic. Ashley Cline's "loading a new continent" is a meditation on inheritance both chosen and imposed: the myths we carry ("we are related to Patsy Cline, the famous country-music singer, we just can't prove it yet"), the ecological legacies we're born into ("you are now entering the anthropocene"), and the ways we learn to carry what cannot be kept. Here is a poet who understands that to witness truly means to listen for the spaces between words, to trust that "even the wings of / the honeybee can move this: / our loose earth— / & so, it does."
–Gaia Rajan, author of "Killing It"