Ashley Capps, a wonderful poet whose slice-of-life story unfolds in the pages of Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields.
By Morgan McKenna
Hailing from Northern Carolina, Capps received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has held fellowships from the Iowa Arts Council and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. And in her first book Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields published in 2006, readers are let into her life through an epiphany, symbolisms of animals and the turmoil of interpersonal relationships through the lens of hindsight.
To start at the beginning is to start with the epiphany of being displaced. Her first poem is the book, “Hymn for Two Choirs,” sets the tone early in the morning where restlessness staves off sleep and a question is asked, “Why did I only live for one thing.” Compared to a huge dog and a neighbor’s t-shirt, she can only sit and ponder as the world passes her by.
In her very next poem of the humble and poisonous name, “God Bless Our Crop-Dusted Wedding Cake,” the turmoil of her family slowly begins to reveal itself. A brief family of a mother drunk, a father reckless, and a sister dead and gone. But this second poem has a point of view through her father’s eyes, it is through his imagined point of view Capps comes to terms with this part of her life. Where despite the turmoil, sentimentality shows through.
Several of these poems in this book are about an ex, the more popular to quote being “Reading an Ex-Lover’s First Novel.” But I’d like to look at the poem, “Gripes the Lover Leveled (Leaving).” Here there is symbolism of a dog on a sweater, a familiar beast out of place when tied to the sweater it is sewn onto. The tone is agitated with Capps pronouncing herself “gaudy and ruthless,” likely through her ex’s words, a relationship to be good and done with but to look back on and not forget why things ended.
In current days, Capps lives in the Blue Ridge mountains in North Carolina. She works with the animal rights non-profit Free from Harm. And she is a writer, editor, and researcher for the food and climate justice non-profit A Well-Fed World. Capps is working on a second collection of poems entitled The FOReSt. Some of her most recent work was published in Indiana University South Bend’s very own annual online literary journal, The Glacier. And she co-edits THE NEW SENT(I)ENCE, with the poet Allison Titus, an animal poetry anthology and manifesto forthcoming from Trinity University Press this year.
sourced from the about section of her own wordpress site
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