A Muse Bouche

by Sally Ashton

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  • Happy to be included: Pushcart Prize Nominations from The Fortnightly Review

    Congratulations to the nominees!

    We have a lot to celebrate as we approach the ending of the first year of the revived Fortnightly Review, and part of that celebration has taken the form of nominating six of our installments for the Pushcart Prize! For those who don’t know, the Pushcart Press is one of the most venerable institutions recognizing the work of of small presses and literary magazines. Since 1976 they’ve been honoring the best “poetry, fiction, and literary whatnot” published by small presses every year. “Literary whatnot” is practically our middle name here at TFR, so we are proud to announce the nomination of the following authors for their work:

    • Sally Ashton, “Dispatch from the Moon: Soft Landing”
    • Joseph Donahue, “As the Stars Are Apart: Blaketalk”
    • Amy Glynn, “Black Narcissus”
    • Jeffrey Kahrs and Mete Özel, translations of poems from the Turkish by Deniz Durukan, Aylin Antmen, and Nilay Özel
    • Janet Sarbanes, “The Fox in the Garden”
    • Simon Perril, “The Audubon Dish”

    Congratulations to all of our witty, erudite, ecstatic, despairing, eloquent, well-traveled, and well-read nominees!

    The Fortnightly Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

    BIG THANKS!!

    Sally Ashton

    December 11, 2025
    Uncategorized
  • This is happening!

    https://www.dukeupress.edu/going-to-the-moon

    Sally Ashton

    December 1, 2025
    Uncategorized
    Lunar Codex, memoir, Moon, New book
  • Soft Landing

    Here’s something new from me…a sort of hybrid haibun, published by The Fortnightly Review, the revived 19th-century literary magazine founded by Anthony Trollope. I hope it conveys somewhat my recent experience.

    Dispatch from the Moon: Soft Landing

    Haiku moon tonight
    I lie awake until dawn
    counting syllables

    Lunar Codex: A time capsule of art headed to the Moon. Collected from writers, musicians, filmmakers, models, designers, and artisans from 262 countries and territories and 149 Indigenous nations from all across the planet, it includes one of my poems. Our works miniaturized, engraved on nickel-plated nanofiche placed aboard lunar landers as private payload, artifacts meant to bear witness to the human spirit and the culture of our time leaving a different kind of footprint, one that will last forever on the face of the Moon.

    On a nighttime walk, our son’s partner from the Scottish Highlands asks if the sky is lit by light pollution or the Moon. She likes the glow, to be able to see the clouds at night. “It’s like our sky when there’s a full Moon,” she says. And I wonder. I can always see the clouds at night here.

    (full poem here)

    Sally Ashton

    May 28, 2025
    Uncategorized
    Lunar Codex, Moon, Moon landing
  • On the Moon!

    March 2, 2025

    Hard to comprehend: My poem, “4.6 Billion years,” selected as part of the Lunar Codex SERENITY archive, was onboard the NASA CLPS-TO-19D mission, launched January 15. It landed in Mare Crisium on the Moon in the early morning hours of March 2. Here is a photo sent shortly after by the Blue Ghost Lander of its shadow on the lunar surface, Earth watching from afar.

    Photo credit: NASA/Firefly Aerospace

    LUNAR CODEX is partnered with LifeShip, who sent a plant seed bank in a pyramid-shaped receptacle. LifeShip is partners with Firefly Aerospace whose Blue Ghost is the CLPS lander in this NASA mission.

    Holy cow.

    Sally Ashton

    March 6, 2025
    Uncategorized
    LifeShip, Lunar Codex, Moon, on the Moon, poetry
  • Launching to the Moon!

    My poem “4.6 Billion Years” is off on the first of three separate space missions. I’ll be watching–virtually–Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander lift off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. NASA, SpaceX, and Firefly Aerospace are targeting 1:11 a.m. EST Wednesday, Jan. 15, for the launch of Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, the next delivery to the Moon through NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative.

    Etched in nickel-plated nanofiche with thousands of other cultural artifacts chosen as part of the LUNAR CODEX project’s time capsules, “4.6 Billion Years” is headed for a landing at Mare Crisium on the Moon! Stay tuned~

    https://plus.nasa.gov/scheduled-video/firefly-launch-to-the-moon/

    Sally Ashton

    January 12, 2025
    Uncategorized
    4.6 billion years, Moon, NASA, poem
  • A new review at NewPages

    -thanks Jami Macarty

    “Book Review :: Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton”

    • September 3, 2024
    • Book Reviews
    Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton book cover image

    Review by Jami Macarty

    Sally Ashton’s fifth book Listening to Mars offers readers “thought experiments otherwise known as poems” while “trying to understand” the COVID-19 health crisis, which brought with it death, uncertainty, anxiety, social upheaval, and political protest. Across the globe, “People began to die” or were “separated” from their families while “shelves emptied” and “we were forced to watch the execution of an innocent man in slow motion, over and over.” In other words, “the really big tragedies [of] these days.”

    . . .Read the full review here.

    Sally Ashton

    September 5, 2024
    Uncategorized
  • The Hive Poetry Collective

    Cool time interview with Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate Farnaz Fatemi
    Listening to Mars

    Listen on Spotify

    Sally Ashton

    August 13, 2024
    Uncategorized
    Interview, poetry, poetry book
  • Interview at “The Mackinaw”

    Interview: Sally Ashton, On Listening to Mars

    The Mackinaw: Tell us something about your writing journey and how prose poetry became a part of it.

    Sally Ashton: I began what could be described as a serious pursuit of poetry after my youngest of three children entered elementary school. Both time and attention are fraught with little ones underfoot, so I hadn’t done much writing during that period. After subsequently finishing a long-abandoned BA in English/Creative Writing minor as a “returning student,” I jumped next into the MFA program at Bennington Writing Seminars. There I had the privilege of working with David Lehman, editor of Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present which, coincidentally, he was putting together during the time I was his student. So that’s where and when I was exposed to prose poetry more broadly. At Bennington, I was introduced to a variety of ideas and approaches by my other faculty, student colleagues, as well as the wide variety of amazing guest lecturers brought to campus. Alice Notley was one of these writers, and while I don’t recall the title of her lecture, I’ve never forgotten her startling-to-me assertion that formal line break is essentially a patriarchal structure. I don’t know if I can defend that, but it definitely gave me incentive to play more freely with line and specifically with the prose poem form. 

    For you, what is the definition of a prose poem? See my answer, and MORE, at “The Mackinaw“!

    Sally Ashton

    May 22, 2024
    Uncategorized
    creative-writing, Interview, Listening to Mars, poem, poetry, prose, Prose poem, The Mackinaw, writing
  • On The Margin: Interview with Ethelbert Miller!

    Discussing poetry and my latest, “Listening to Mars.”

    Listen Here or on Apple podcasts

    Sally Ashton

    April 26, 2024
    Uncategorized
  • “Listening to Mars” review by Addie Mahmassani

    Listening to Mars by Sally Ashton

    Sally Ashton

    March 24, 2024
    Uncategorized
    book review, Mars, poetry, poetry book
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