Gold Light Shining by Bebe Ashley
72 pages
Paperback
22 October 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9956550-8-9
72 pages
Paperback
22 October 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9956550-8-9
72 pages
Paperback
22 October 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9956550-8-9
Within five minutes, I knew
I loved the stranger in my head.
In her debut collection of poetry, Bebe Ashley spins gold from the detritus of the internet. A landscape often depicted as a wasteland is illuminated in poems that explore celebrity, obsession, sexuality, coming of age, and that charismatic enigma, Harry Styles.
Inspired by sources as diverse as Styles’s track listings, Scandi webseries Skam, and One Direction newsletters, Ashley spins us across continents on a tour of the surreal highs and absurd lows of celebrity culture. These are poems of youth and yearning, yet they’re suffused with the hard-won wisdom that the communities we build can be as meaningful as the families we’re born into.
Perceptive, witty, and exuberant, Gold Light Shining introduces an essential new voice; one that captures how pop culture’s Technicolor joy disrupts our greyscale world.
About the Author
Bebe Ashley lives in Belfast. She is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Her work can be found in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Jukebox and The Tangerine.
When procrastinating from her PhD, she takes British Sign Language and Braille classes and writes pop culture articles for United by Pop, specialising in Harry Styles.
Media
Bebe on Arena’s Culture Night Special | RTE Radio 1 | 23 September 2022
Gold Light Shining reviewed on The Poetry Programme | RTE Radio 1 | 12 December 2021
Gold Light Shining reviewed by Kimberly Reyes | The Stinging Fly | 30 September 2021
The best books about fame and fanhood | i-D | 1 September 2021
Bebe on The Poetry Programme | RTE Radio 1 | 31 January 2021
Bebe on The Lynette Fay Show | BBC Radio Ulster | 23 November 2020
A Poem on a Page: ‘Ink and Hellebore’ | Ulster Tatler | November 2020
Bebe on The Business | RTE Radio 1 | 14 November 2020
Harry Styles and me: How QUB student Bebe Ashley ended up writing book about One Direction superstar | The Belfast Telegraph | 4 November 2020
Beginner’s Pluck: ‘Find a niche you love and run with it’ | The Irish Examiner | 24 October 2020
Gold Light Shining: On Poems and a Pop-Star Persona by Bebe Ashley | The Honest Ulsterman | October 2020
Bebe Ashley & Laura Cassidy on All About Books | Dublin City FM | 22 October 2020
Launch Video
Praise for Gold Light Shining
“Gold Light Shining is a dazzling collection; a sequence of sequins between glam and glamour. Its ricochets and riffs on the works of Harry Styles are both tender and rapturous. Not merely the intensities of fandom, the poems betray a profound sensitivity to the politics of looking: who gazes at whom, they ask; what is obscured by celebrity, what is revealed. This is a kaleidoscopic book, full of its own light, its prisms, its beautiful forms.”
“With Gold Light Shining, Bebe Ashley manages to celebrate all the wild intensity of individual fandom in a way that is instantly recognisable to all, managing to capture the instant nostalgia that comes with obsessive interest in the pop firmament, ‘a collective popular object’. In these pages ‘there is something that reminds me / of the best photo from a cheap camera’, and like such photos, these poems call you back again and again, reliving the moment in the moment. A superb debut.”
“Lush and dizzying, these are poems of longing and enchantment stitched with flashes of beauty, poems of yellow silk trousers, secrets, blue eyes, and ‘the low snarl of midnight skies’.”
“The apparent ‘content’ of these poems, that is the life and work of Harry Styles, is not included for its own novelty; rather these poems, by meditating on Styles, become a series of thoughtful, tender, and insightful vignettes about celebrity, fashion, glamour, belonging, sexuality, and youth.”
“A lush mixtape of love poems to an artist, his influences and to pop music itself.”