Photographed by Matthew Thompson
Bebe Ashley
Writer
Harbour Doubts
Harbour Doubts
The things I want to say have always been there but invisible,
until I make them visible in their small, confident, pockets of air.
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.
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COMING JULY 2025
Gold Light Shining
Gold Light Shining
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.
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A photograph of yellow 3D-printed Braille fragments of different sizes arranged on a black and white floral paper bag.
A pile of highly coloured 3D-printed Braille fragments.
A single yellow Braille fragment on various pieces of white paper. A pen and pencil rests on oppostie edges of the frame. In purple ink, Happy New Year is written above the Braille fragment.
Two small square white frames. The backing paper is dark blue, fixed ontop are yellow 3D-printed Braille fragmnets arranged in the form of a poem.