MORE PRAISE FOR
burning, breaking, building
“Through mirrors of grit and gratefulness, the poems in burning, breaking, building show us rock bottom within the framework of The Death Card in Tarot: both in the world of the dying and the living. Sometimes so tender it stings, Bunn has shed her skin on paper for us to smooth, a living legacy that will surely reclaim us all of us suffering the fate of desperation and despair.”
HILLARY LEFTWICH, AUTHOR OF SAINT DYMPHNA’S PLAYBOOK
“It is the sacred work of the poet to scavenge through the ashes of all that was, and find within them some boiled down truth that will be the spirit of tomorrow, an elegy for the past, a potent echo of the now. In these pages, Ashley Howell Bunn does just this, showing us the still smoking, smoldering soul that is a poem, in all its unbecoming and rebirths, in all its falling apart and coming together again…”
ALEXANDER SHALOM JOSEPH, AUTHOR OF THE CLEARING
“A child believes he once existed as grass. A daughter recognizes the premonition in a sweater later knotted with grief. And sickness awakens a body memory of the hard paddle away from the island of drink. There is entanglement here, between recovery while mothering while mourning while wondering how a legacy is inherited or broken.
Ashley’s words are strung and restrung, held lovingly, then soon scattered and gorgeously distilled as haibun passageways via erasure. Her stories stack thickly amongst fire, hospitals, snow, blood, and stars, until sheer deluge splits the body open and clarity surfaces amid a breath of sparsity whittled out of the fervid tendency to continue and continue.
Ashley Howell Bunn is unflinchingly fragile and embodied in this cyclical voyage with birth and death as her shipmates. With both pluck and wonder, she’s showing us how it may be done.”
JESSICA RIGNEY, AUTHOR OF SOMETHING WHOLE
south broadway press 