**On Other Edens by Ash Bowen**

by Tyler Truman Julian

Ash Bowen’s Vassar Miller Prize-winning collection, Other Edens, is a punchy interrogation of lust, love, grief and violence. The condensed, 65-page collection maintains a wistful, melancholy tone that only lets up in moments of tongue-in-cheek levity. As a result, the reading experience can only be described as a type of pleasurable discomfort. The pleasure arrives from the speaker’s vulnerability, the poems’ accessibility and the sensual detail sprinkled throughout the collection, wherein the discomfort develops from these same qualities. The barefaced honesty of these poems—as they recount a lover’s unfaithfulness and eventual death and use this story as a lens through which to view larger family dynamics—is disquieting yet refreshing. The poems of Other Edens are nuanced and charged with an energy that makes the collection difficult to put down.
The collection opens with a pastoral poem that establishes a bittersweet, even nostalgic, tone— injecting sex into the perfect, godly image of the Garden of Eden. The characters presented in “The Other Version of Eden” are at a crossroads in their relationship, yet their sexually charged relationship propels them forward:

            …God sent
            them to the wilds to fix their failing marriage:
            She’d pull him to her private garden and strip
            the apple down. Together they would share it.

What follows this poem is hence filtered through this erotic retelling. The poems of Other Edens are all sensual, if not sexual, and embrace imagery to vividly insert the reader into the experiences relayed by the speaker. This includes moments of violence and anguish, as presented in “Heat”:

            The devil gets his heat from Arkansas,
            my father used to say. I do not fib
            about the men who’ve raised a hand to me.
            I knew he’d seen how summer clenched its jaw
            around the blast furnace in McNab
            and killed those men clocking out for home.
            I do not make these stories up. What pales
            to Gramma’s father being one of her uncles?
            Beside my father stripping my sister’s panties
            below her ankles before he broke her in
            to welts with leather? I come back here again:
            Sweating beside the payphone outside of Smitties,
            Mother scratching silver lotto circles,
            hope disappearing beneath her fingernails.

Though not explicit in “Heat,” Other Edens frequently juxtaposes, and then blurs the line between, sex and violence. “Fetish” uses the destruction of real-world wildfires to explore the impact of the lover’s affair. The speaker reports,

The fire grew closer and so did her lover
They fucked for hours in the licking light

until tractors came with fire brigades and blazes
slowed into a smolder

             Later when horses tore through stables and cows snapped
                miles of cattle wire      they knew
                        the fire had jumped and pinned them down

                 They fucked faster in the face of this new hazard

             Knowing that fire has leave to burn whatever
                                                            humans truly love

they stopped they dropped they rolled
themselves together soaked their sheets in kerosene

and scorched the house from room to room

The (self-)destruction implied in “Fetish” reads as apt as the lover’s adultery destroys the relationships in her household wherein her death hangs over the collection. This complicated relationship between sex and destruction is titillating and further amplifies the wistfulness across the collection.

Though Other Edens never relieves the pressure it places on the reader’s own morality, the collection arrives at a satisfying conclusion. The speaker appears changed as time passes. A hard-earned wisdom is the reward for the loss and hurt endured. If a moral is meant to be found, the speaker seems to offer only that life is meant to be appreciated, but in order to appreciate it one must live it, facing the good and beautiful along with the bad and ugly. One way the reader can live life fully is in experiencing these poems and sitting with all they have to offer.

In case you missed it—check out Ash Bowen’s poem, "The Last Love Letter of Marie Curie,” in ISSUE 23 of The Shore.