Good Ash

"Threaded through with memories and dreams, Kika Dorsey's Good Ash reminds me that even as our children cut themselves loose and our parents cross over-'the breath of a day lends wind to the blackbird wings' and 'the desert is an open skirt weaving blossoms above needles.' Dorsey communicates with deft, lyrical imagery an absolute truth I need to hear: nature is constant and nature is change." -Sonia Greenfield, author of Helen of Troy is High AF Kika Dorsey remains one of the best poets writing today. Her confessional style may be influenced by Plath and Sexton, but her voice is uniquely her own. Her language is replete with surprise and revelation, her images brilliant and indelible. -James Cherry, author of Between Chance and MercyGood Ash had me putting on my sweater believing I was cold and then realizing it was goosebumps from the line-by-line beauty her poems rained down on my spine-tingled soul. 'I reach to touch my shoulders, ache for wings,' she divulges, hunting and descending and lusting to fly all at once. Dorsey portrays our ancestors as piecing us together from pain in the hopes of a better tomorrow: 'You are behind me like a twisted road and reach before me / like an invisible season,' she tells them, gratefully. And while her 'father's suicide resides / in the ladder of [her] ribs where he climbs and jumps headfirst again and again,' her love for her children emerges from her ever-breaking heart, reminds us of what is possible.-Elizabeth Strauss Friedman, author of The Lost PositiveBone and blood, ghost and grave achieve their songs in the poet's voice: 'I have pinned to the wind every ghost that haunts me.' In describing loved ones' fates, both accidental and intentional, Dorsey's language despairs and longs, celebrates and loves: '... what we unbury / can fly.'-Jessica Purdy, author of The Adorable Knife: Poems after The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Frances Glessner Lee