Electric Infinities (Ashley Cline)

In a voice both honeyed yet unsparing, Ashley Cline’s electric infinities leads us to the end of the world. Uninterested in offering platitudes to those seeking solid ground on a planet of such uncertain terrain, Cline instead makes a gift of companionship, a promise that “we’ll slow dance in/to / the end.” Amongst the burnings and guttings of an ever-looming apocalypse, Cline grants readers reprieve in a landscape of wildflowers and feral gardens, bites of summer peaches and sips of dandelion wine. Here, even in death, bodies become sites of possibility. Even at the end of everything, Cline makes space for the “perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.” One finds, in these poems, not the weak pulse of a fading heart but a determination “to bring the color back to earth.”

—Katrina Smolinsky