Books

Going to the Moon, forthcoming July 14, 2026
Duke University Press

Listening to Mars February 1, 2024!

Cornerstone Press: $21.95
Length: 120 pages
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 978-1-960329-26-4​
Listening to Mars serves as a record of our national transit, one a journey from there—before the Covid-19 pandemic—to here—a new now. Our microscopes pinpoint a virus; our telescopes search the edges of the Universe; we look, as we always have, to the heavens for comfort and clarity. Underlying our global social turmoil is the environmental emergency we find ourselves facing, and the irony of seeking new worlds while degrading if not destroying our own. With empathy and precision, Sally Ashton moves through the time of our confinement and an increasingly fractured world, trying to tell the story, to bear witness, to find a way through. Trying to find the glints of light in the journey we are still traveling.


Review by Addie Mahmassani for Metro Silicon Valley.

from GoodReads, Anatoly Molotkov‘s review:
“Reflective, enigmatic, futuristic and full of hope, Sally Ashton’s collection places the reader in an inquisitive space where our humanity is carefully scrutinized with the use of birds, heroes, satellites, waves, stars with their handy planets – and other conceptual instruments, grand and small.”

The Behaviour of Clocks

smallestcover

WordFarm: $18
Length: 89 pages
Size: 6 x 9 inches
Binding: paper
April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60226-021-4
Debuting very nearly on the 100th anniversary of the first observation confirming Albert Einstein’s prediction that light from another star would be bent by the sun’s gravity, Sally Ashton’s new collection of prose poems uses Einstein’s famous thought experiments as the launchpad for a poetic inquiry into time and memory.

Purchase: The Behaviour of Clocks (R.I.P. WordFarm Press, 2025, victim of pandemic and SPD demise) Should Amazon run out of copies, please contact me @ sally.ashton@sjsu.edu for direct sale.
Endorsements


Some Odd Afternoon

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Some Odd Afternoon
BlazeVOX $16
IBSN 9781935402817
2010, 93 pp., $16.00

(cover art by Chris Roberts-Antieu)
Reviewed by Dean Rader for Rattle


Her Name is Juanita

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Her Name Is Juanita
Kore Press $12
44 pages, 5.5 x 8.5″ paper, hand-bound
ISBN 978-1-888553-38-3
“A beautiful tribute to the fecundity of obsession.” –Amy Gerstler
“Sensual & luminous, mystical & comic.”–Nin Andrews

 

These Metallic Days

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These Metallic Days
Main Street Rag $7
ISBN 1-930907-72-9
Poetry, 38 pages
Editor’s Choice Chapbook Series

 

ANTHOLOGIES

ANTHOLOGIES edited:

New Cover THEY SAID - 2018 FINAL
Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: June 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62557-701-6
$35.95

ANTHOLOGIES in which work appears:

In the Footsteps of a Shadow
North American Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa

In the Footsteps of a Shadow
MadHat Press
edited by Charles Cutler, Dan Mahoney & Gaby Gordon-Fox
$23.95, paperback, 386 pp
ISBN-13:  978-1-952335-88-4
Praise:
This lush florilegium of poetic evocations, variations, and inquiries is a beautiful testament to how far and fruitfully Pessoa’s shadow reaches.
—Richard Zenith

This book is one of a kind. What it reveals is how a master of nothingness can inspire an endless fabric of thingness woven by others. This book offers us echoes and reechoes springing from a void. It is a reworking of Genesis. Overwhelming.                           —Alexis Levitin

Fernando Pessoa enters the imaginations of these gifted American poets like a frightening medicine, challenging them to self-divide, multiply, renounce stability, and relish in the dead-time that our culture so vehemently abhors. Like a slippery thorn in the myth of bigger, better individualism, Pessoa seems to have privately solicited these poets for disturbing conversations about nothing: a nothing that he promotes as everything.        
—Larissa Szporluk

This superb anthology offers ample testimony to Pessoa’s place now in the North American literary mainstream as well as to the momentum towards this distinction that has been building over time.
—Onésimo Almeida



Dancing about Architecture
and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers

Dancing about Architecture
edited by Oz Hardwick & Cassandra Atherton
$22.95, paperback, 274 pp
ISBN-13:  978-1-952335-76-1

Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom

Dreaming Awake
MadHat Press, 2023
$22.95
ISBN 1952335507

The Polaris Trilogy: Poems for the Moon

Work in his anthology will travel as nickel-plated NanoFiche as part of the Lunar Codex time capsule aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lander to the Moon’s South Pole in 2025.

The Polaris Trilogy: Poems for the Moon
Brick Street Poetry, Inc, 2023
$18
ISBN ‎ 979-8888950128
213 pg.

Alcatraz

Alcatraz
(an illustrated, international anthology of short prose and prose poetry)
Gazebo Books, Summer Hill,
New South Wales, December 2022
Hardbound
ISBN 978-0-6454648-8-7


Prose Poetry: An Introduction

9780691180656

Prose Poetry: An Introduction
Price:$19.95 / £14.99ISBN:
Published (US):Oct 13, 2020
Published (UK):Nov 2, 2020
Copyright:2020Pages:344

A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly

Cast-Iron
A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, ed. Peter Johnson
MadHat Press, 2019 $21.95
ISBN 978-1941196-92-2


More Good Talk. Laurel Editions, 2017.

The Classical Elements in Fiber &Poetry, exhibit catalog, four poems. 2015.

Good Talk. Laurel Editions, 2015.

99 Poems for the 99 Percent, 99: The Press, 2014.

Local Habitations. Laurel Editions, 2013.

Mississippi Review 30 Year Anthology. Mississippi Revew, 2012.

An Introduction to the Prose Poem, Firewheel Editions, 2009.

Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes, C & R Press, 2008.

2 responses to “Books”

  1. […] Ashton is the author of Some Odd Afternoon, Her Name Is Juanita, and These Metallic Days. She is Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, an online journal featuring […]

  2. I am intrigued to learn more about Sally Ashton’s exploration of time, memory, and the human condition.

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