Gold Light Shining by Bebe Ashley
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