Photographed by Matthew Thompson
Bebe Ashley
Writer
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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“There’s a capacious and energetic thrust to these poems”
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.