Harbour Doubts by Bebe Ashley
78 pages
Paperback
3 July 2025
ISBN: 978-1-917161-00-8
Winner:
Ivan Juritz Prize 2023
Every morning I check the kettle for slugs.
In the downstairs hallway, on warmer mornings,
the brocade wallpaper peels from the walls.
On colder nights, it crinkles and cracks appear.
In the right light, I can sometimes see a silver trail
winding along the crevices of the knotted treads.
Bebe Ashley’s prizewinning second collection charts the poet’s efforts to qualify as a British Sign Language interpreter. Intershot with enquiries into the nature of language as it is spoken and signed, and the process of leaving and finding home, Harbour Doubts is a collection that tangles with the burning desire to communicate in the isolation of a late capitalist, post-pandemic world. It’s also a love letter to the delights of linguistics and language, a three-dimensional exploration of words and the body. Bringing together meditations on language as mediated through sound, sign, vision, and film, this exciting sophomore collection cements Bebe Ashley’s reputation as a fearless experimenter.
About the Author
Bebe Ashley lives in Northern Ireland and works at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Her debut collection Gold Light Shining (Banshee Press, 2020) was selected for the Arts Council’s Read Mór programme in 2022. Her work is most recently published in Granta, The Stinging Fly, bath magg, and Modern Poetry in Translation. In 2023, Bebe received the Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment (Text) and in 2024, she received a British Council Fellowship.
Author photoby Matthew Thompson
Praise for Harbour Doubts
“Ashley’s playful and moving book tells the all-too-rare tale of how someone dedicates their life to learn a new language and become a translator. I read in a state of suspense as its protagonist’s need to mediate and connect overspills, clashing with their isolation and thwarted attempts at vocational success and intimacy with others. It’s an embodied and tactile book that is also about the act of writing and one’s attempt to say something with care and abandon.”
“A joyous celebration of the learning and the loving self as in my favourite lines, which are the last lines: ‘Sometimes I lose myself in the momentum of my own hands. Joy turns into applause and I’m speaking another language again.’”
“In sinuous poems full of power, Bebe Ashley explores loneliness, dislocation and the challenges of communication. Through her study of sign language, Ashley draws us into the empty spaces between words, and all that can be found in these silences. An ambitious collection that pushes the boundaries between prose and poetry, Harbour Doubts is also remarkable for its clarity and its emotional charge.”
“These poems bear the clear voice of a quiet visionary taking stock in turbulent times. Ashley’s speakers risk everything to examine what is and isn’t there in the frightening in-between spaces of love, disappointment, and isolation. This is a surprising and moving collection made compelling by the strikingly simple, ordered curiosity of its watchers — both close-up and at a distance. They are committed to interpreting the signs as means of telling us, and themselves, to keep going.”
“Harbour Doubts, and in many ways, Bebe Ashley’s poetry at large, is a feeling-full exploration of language as a poultice, if not an entire remedy, to loneliness. Harbour Doubts astonished me page after page.”
“The most important thing to know is that I have nearly always wanted to become a sign language interpreter, says the speaker halfway through this beautifully experimental, tender and deeply moving collection. The poems lead the reader through memories, storytelling and even a few instruction manuals towards the sheer excitement, joy and heartbreak that are so often part of learning a new language.”
