In her debut collection of poetry, Bebe Ashley spins gold from the detritus of the internet. A landscape often depicted as a wasteland is illuminated in poems that explore celebrity, obsession, sexuality, coming of age, and that charismatic enigma, Harry Styles. Inspired by sources as diverse as Styles's track listings, Scandi webseries Skam, and One Direction newsletters, Ashley spins us across continents on a tour of the surreal highs and absurd lows of celebrity culture. These are poems of youth and yearning, yet they're suffused with the hard-won wisdom that the communities we build can be as meaningful as the families we're born into. Perceptive, witty, and exuberant, Gold Light Shining introduces an essential new voice; one that captures how pop culture's Technicolor joy disrupts our greyscale world.
Gold Light Shining by Bebe Ashley was published on 22 October 2020 by Banshee Press. As part of this #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour, I am delighted to share an extract from the book with you today.
Kiwi / Kiwi / Kiwi
The boy with the Gucci guitar strings
is playing glam rock to a room of strangers.
His photographer captures a group of girls in knock- off floral suits and pink sequin Chelsea boots.
Hearts thumping heaving jumping, his final song shakes the sweat-slick stage on the concrete floor.
The guitarist who used to work in the pizza shop looks to the bassist, the keys, the drummer
to know if this is normal. It is not normal: people are having the time of their lives.
Bebe Ashley lives in Belfast.
She is an AHRC funded PhD candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.
Her work can be found in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Jukebox and The Tangerine.
When procrastinating from her PhD, she takes British Sign Language and Braille classes and writes pop culture articles for United by Pop, specialising in Harry Styles.
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