Basic Heart

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Winner of the 2008 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize

Basic Heart is a primer on the emotional topography of the human heart, its complexities and fluctuations, its nuances and metaphors. From tropes grounded in the fantastic landscapes of awareness, of desire and despair, Ashley draws us a map of a world and shows us just how that "world is turned like a pig on a spit." She brings us back to the recognition that we are all ordinary, that sometimes we need saving, and that "what is saved just might turn beautiful."

About the Author

Renee Ashley is the author of three volumes of poetry: Salt (Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press), The Various Reasons of Light and The Revisionist's Dream (Avocet Press), as well as a chapbook, The Museum of Lost Wings, and a novel, Someplace Like This. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as a Pushcart Prize. She is on the core faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University's low-residency MFA in the Creative Writing program.

Reviews

"With great originality and authority, and with a sense of high-wired, artistic risk, Renee Ashley's Basic Heart offers us new kinds of songs for our broken-down age. Even if you took away her spicy chutzpah, her work would still stand out for its brisk, crisp voice, big heart, and colorful intelligence. She's nervous and edgy and eagle-eyed. She's the real thing."
—Jack Meyers, Series Judge

Published by Texas Review Press

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Of Related Interest

The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume X: Alabama