A Self, a Frame, a Look in Through

Reading Ashley Mabbitt's gleaming debut collection, A Self A Frame A Look In Through, is like gazing at a Vermeer-and wondering how the artist did it. With her stealth brilliance, she seems to have composed these poems as if she's quietly placed the clamor of lived life into a camera obscura. In Mabbitt's hands, tangled experiences of love and disconnection, of history and personal history, of objects and rooms, come to reveal moving, poignant, warmly lit souls. While light angles and shadows underpin, the lines of her poems sort the ambiguities of modern life with hushed understanding and an amused view of the self. A Self A Frame A Look In Through is a radiant debut.

-Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: Poems

As the title suggests, a keen ekphrastic impulse sparks many of these poems, which are marked by a scrupulous attention to detail that conjures both Rilke and Moore. Yet Mabbitt, speculative and probing, often expands and transforms ekphrasis, veering suddenly from what she observes into psychological terrains of acute self-awareness, tenderness, or urgency. Conversely, her habit of meticulous description enhances poems of family, memory, objects, and experience, so that a pair of inherited salt and pepper shakers may appear as revelatory as a Rodin. These are thus deftly stealthy poems-that surprise and provoke in the most rewarding way.

-Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Ashley Mabbitt's debut collection A Self, A Frame, A Look in Through gifts us with a speaker attuned to the most delicate shifts and nuances of the internal and external realms. Psychologically astute and alert, curious and care-filled, Mabbitt's poems divine the worlds contained within the smallest of objects, the briefest of gestures. And whether imagining themselves into the lost portraits of Velazquez or a forgotten jar of jelly on a refrigerator shelf, they harken to the odd angle, the easily disregarded, the unsaid and undreamed-of-undreamed-of, that is, except by this poet, whose serious, steady looking turns again and again into a generous and capacious seeing, a tender mirror welcoming "great flocks of migrating birds."

-Kasey Jueds