GARRETT ASHLEY
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​"In Garrett Ashley’s splendid Field Guide to North American Trees the trees speak for themselves. Who says that anthropomorphizing nature is wrong? Certainly not when Ashley records this strange and pungent testament. Reading these sylvan voices is an adventure you won’t soon forget." -Angela Ball, author of Steeplechase
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In A Field Guide to North American Trees, Garrett Ashley moves through the landscape with exacting precision. Each poem, a tree—ripe with its own telling. As the poet walks, we walk alongside him, rewarded by this trek. We find ourselves here—and everywhere emotionally—yet rooted by the act of witnessing. From Garrett’s forest, we glean undeniably raw, but necessary understories. -Glenis Redmond, Poet Laureate of Greenville, SC
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The poems in Field Guide to North American Trees are polyvocal, uncanny, pulsing with desire. Inviting readers to consider roots, needles, nodes, and ring scars, Garrett Ashley takes us to an interconnected world, a "green ocean," a pinewood where trees summon for us loved and lost ones, where "understories are people and the wind is a bird." -William Woolfitt, author of Eyes Moving Through the Dark
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PERIPHYLLA
AND OTHER
DEEP OCEAN
ATTRACTIONS
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These tales raise shudders of the existential dread rather than ‘Halloween-boo!’ scares, despite such Lovecraftian mainstays as tentacles, ichthyic environments, and creature-metamorphoses. An unsettling bestiary of narratives for SF and horror readers with a taste for unease.
—Kirkus Reviews
Periphylla and Other Deep Ocean Attractions is alive in every sense of the word: the writing is beautiful, the stories surprising and bright, and the pages are also crawling with creatures and our own wild, creaturely human selves.
—Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal and A Guide to Being Born
Rarely have I encountered an author capable of balancing the absurd and the heartfelt as Garrett Ashley. Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions plunges us into the depths of Ashley's vivid imagination, serving up conceits both fantastic and outrageous. Here can be found worlds where strange creatures live side by side with even stranger humans, and Ashley's best trick is humanizing his oddballs, seemingly with little sleight of hand. This is a thoroughly enjoyable and exciting debut, unflinching and unforgettable.
—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze: Stories
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Garrett Ashley has created a panorama of tales with Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions. This is a striking collection that shifts between worlds, from the creatures that inhabit the land and sea, to the two-legged humans that walk around troubled and confused, fighting to make sense of it all. These stories are a reminder that there is much beauty, and pain, in all creation.
—Michael Farris Smith, author of Salvage This World and Desperation Road
A fever-hot exhalation of wonder. In these stories, aquariums hold leviathans, amoeba people burst through fake human skins, bruises ache from past lives, and the dead return as pigs. Heady, blistering, and tender as a wound.
—Micah Dean Hicks, author of Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones
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Periphylla and Other Deep Ocean Attractions is an intense read, it is teeming with life in so many forms: sea creatures (obviously) but also yak, pigs, reptiles, peacocks, snails, spiders, even single-celled organisms. Each story has its own strong voice, and in each story, Ashley manages to create a separate, memorable world. More often than not, the boundaries between human and animal life become permeable, if not invisible."
—Annette C. Boehm, author of The Apidictor Tapes