Listening to Mars
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.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
"In Listening to Mars, we find Sally Ashton at the height of her poetic powers, juxtaposing prose and verse poems and melding intellectual and scientific history with autobiography to explore the struggles we face when confronted daily by the miraculous and terrifying universe we inhabit. The uncertainties and frightening images of Covid's early rampage also hover over this book, with the poet eventually emerging from her cocoon in the final poem-a poem that suggests a Sisyphean acceptance of our precarious place in the cosmos. 'To pick up again, ' she writes, 'and head out an open door. It is to reawaken, to leave behind the dream life, trade it for, yes, life to live, to lose.'"
-Peter Johnson, author of While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
"Listening is the quietest of talents, and the most fruitful. In this moving collection, Sally Ashton brings to readers what she heard as time and space had their way with us during the early years of the pandemic. In these poems, she creates Einsteinian thought experiments, tools for understanding and enduring the grief and beauty of a world where 'nothing stands still.' Loss and wonder, dread and awe gyrate throughout the book, spinning like heavenly bodies, the poet equally rigorous and tender in her search for 'words that make the world look like what it feels like.' Ashton reveres the mysterious movement of the world and offers it as a comfort: 'While Earth kept turning, gravity held us close.'"
-Holly Iglesias, author of Angles of Approach
"Sally Ashton's Listening to Mars beguiles and wonders. Its poignant, glistering poems meditate on beauty and sadness in equal measure, considering the ineffable and absorbing glories of the cosmos, the Covid pandemic and its aftermath, and the importance of a fully engaged quotidian life. These are subtly crafted, salutary and lyrical examinations of belonging, alienation and the power of memory. They are tough and excruciatingly delicate, with an attentive tenderness-'clear, hot, with a chance of sorrow.' Ashton is recognised internationally for her use of the free line and in Listening to Mars, she uses this mode in thrilling ways to explore philosophies of the neo-sublime. I urge you to follow Ashton's brilliant, transportive works through their powerful considerations of time's exigencies and their valuing of human care and proximity."
-Cassandra Atherton, co-author of Prose Poetry: An Introduction
"What does it mean to be human in the late Anthropocene, when we can send 'rockets to Mars' but must sing operas to potted plants, when zucchini grows 'mad in the garden' but our children fear killing us by coming home for dinner? Ashton's bighearted new collection explores this fertile ground through poems that transport us nimbly from backyard lawn chair to the 'alien wind/singing its deep melody into space.' These are poems of witty watchfulness, mystery at the brink of ruin, and sustained delight in the 'kabillioness/of it all' that you simply won't want to miss."
-Annie Kim, author of Eros Unbroken
