burning, breaking, building

"Ashley Howell Bunn picks up 'small pieces of survival, ' demonstrating that rebirth is possible even when we are sure collapse is irreparable. These poems, arising from the unbearable, find their way to 'sustenance/in abandon.' Using erasure as both form and concept, this poet makes clear that loss can be a form of discovery-in the aftermath of death, life surges into new embodiment and eros. We so badly need poems that have this kind of alchemical courage! burning, breaking, building offers grit and compassion in a time of universal upheaval. To read this book is to experience how absence breaks open to presence and 'heaves [us] into newness.'" -Elizabeth Robinson, Author of Vulnerability Index

"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