Gold Light Shining by Bebe Ashley

€10.00

72 pages
Paperback
22 October 2020
ISBN:
978-0-9956550-8-9

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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.

 
Bebe headshot 1.jpg

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.

 
 

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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.
— Stephen Sexton
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.
— David Toms
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’.
— Doireann Ní Ghríofa
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.
— Padraig Regan
A lush mixtape of love poems to an artist, his influences and to pop music itself.
— Claire Askew