Wild Juice - (Southern Messenger Poets) by Ashley Mace Havird (Paperback)

About the Book

"LSU Press Paperback Original"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

In Wild Juice, the poet and novelist Ashley Mace Havird confronts global and personal change. Her subjects range from the extinction of a prehuman species to the present-day reduction in sea life due to the climate crisis. Closer to home, she confronts the death of her father and her own aging.

Running throughout these lyrics of loss is the richness of communal life, a current of hope given substance by the juice of wild grapes that baptizes the poet's chin and that of her elderly father, whose presence haunts the book. Havird's poems move from sea coasts to the rural South to landlocked suburbia, in language characterized by wit, pluck, and ironic candor.

Through striking evocations of the natural world, conveyed in a voice steeped in mature human experience, Wild Juice speaks memorably on behalf of a life that embraces us all.

Review Quotes

"Ashley Mace Havird's Wild Juice impresses one with productive affinities and distinctions. The experience drives home the open range of current Southern verse--how distinctly, if fearfully and wondrously made these poems are. . . . Havird's words ground us. Her language is straightforward, conversational, open, just as her tone is frank, relaxed, at times wryly funny. . . . [she] shows exquisite control of image, particularly at the start and close of her poems, where piquant images serve as narrative punctuation marks. . . . Havird keeps things real. Make no mistake, however, turning in her hands, the vernacular vibrates with meaning."--Literary Matters

"Clean, clear, and accurate, Havird's poems are reportage from the front lines of a life intensely lived. It is obvious that nothing is lost on the sentience of these poems; but to understand how Havird's mind transforms what otherwise might be ordinary into momentary miracles is to experience, fully, the alchemy of poetry."--T. R. Hummer

"Cross Elizabeth Bishop's eye for observation with Flannery O'Connor's ear for storytelling and you might get Ashley Mace Havird, a poet who grew up on a Southern tobacco farm with a restless intelligence and a steely wit. Look for her star to rise as steadily as Bishop's in the years to come: she is that quietly, astonishingly, enduringly good."--Julie Kane

"In Wild Juice, Ashley Mace Havird flexes her own distinctive, straight-ahead narrative skill by mixing her soulful sense of connectedness with a musician's ear for the intricacies of speech, its richness, and its idiosyncratic prospects."--David Baker

"The forty-nine poems in Wild Juice are written in a somber measure and penetrating voice that seem perfectly tuned to the current moment of pandemic-induced isolation and existential crisis. Together, they conjure an amazing portrait of one woman's exploration of deep internal solitude. Wild Juice is a brave and beautiful book."--Kate Daniels

About the Author

Ashley Mace Havird grew up on a farm in South Carolina. She is the author of three poetry collections and a novel, Lightningstruck. Her poems and stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Shreveport, Louisiana.