About Bomb
by Ashley Inguanta
Ampersand Books
Purchase
"You will feel chills throughout your entire body. Read this book." — Francesca Lia Block
"Ashley Inguanta's Bomb explodes across the page, rendering to rubble what we think we understand about love, loss, and the self. Calling out to the ghost of Amelia Earhart and other "unbearable angels" of the American West, Inguanta guides us through the devastation with a voice that is both deeply vulnerable and wildly free. What else is there to say? I loved this book." – Monica Wendel
"Ashley Inguanta’s new collection of poems Bomb is an evocative meditation on the force of love’s explosive nature. Inguanta uses precise line and form to reveal a reverent, embodied experience with gorgeously layered images and metaphors to remind the reader of love’s familiar tendency to immolate. She maps the terrain of her poetry with cities, buildings, roads, and regions. Love is cartography as well as prayer and a lament. It is destructive, transformative, creative, anguished, passionate, quiet, and still. The lover and the beloved are often voiced as women, but not always. This collection is Inguanta’s heart. Bomb is so beautiful." — April Bradley
"To open this book is to enter the yearning of an uncommon angel, one who envisions the extraordinary in the ordinary, who sees how loss opens to love, how the natural world infuses cities with magic. Geese, coyotes, and roses share the space with glittering human-made lights. At once, though you may see the “Shutter, pressed” and “Life, suspended,” there is the movement of scattering seeds, the earth turning beneath those stars. When the world drops us, it catches us again. This poet navigates a landscape of tangible mirage and dreams in which letting go and merging become one and the same. There is so much light here, in everything, mapping a way for us through ache." — Darlin' Neal
Bomb, Ashley Inguanta's third collection, begins with two humans, and they both love each other deeply: One is attaching a bomb to the other, and they both experience this building/creation as intimacy, as care. Later, we find out what the bomb is made of. These lovers, their world explodes. They learn about themselves and about each other. And eventually, the bomb creates something expansive, something excruciating, something necessary, something exquisite. Purchase Bomb.
About Ashley Inguanta
Ashley Inguanta is a Florida-based writer and artist who is driven by landscape, place. She the author of three collections: The Way Home (Dancing Girl Press, 2013), For the Woman Alone (Ampersand Books, 2014), and Bomb (Ampersand Books, 2016). Ashley served as the Art Director of SmokeLong Quarterly for the past 5 years. You can purchase her artwork at her online store, Echo and Dime: https://society6.com/echoanddime
