Ashley Mace Havird is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Wild Juice (Southern Messenger Poets Series, LSU Press, 2021). The Garden of the Fugitives (Texas Review Press, 2014), won the X. J. Kennedy Prize for Poetry. Havird's poems have appeared in many journals, including Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, and American Journal of Poetry. Her novel, Lightningstruck (Mercer University Press, 2016), won the Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction. Havird lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, with her husband, the poet David Havird.

Books by Ashley Mace Havird:

Other poems on the web by Ashley Mace Havird:
Three poems
"First Year"
"Beach Music"

Ashley Mace Havird's Website.

About Wild Juice:

"'I go for a walk,' Ashley Mace Havird writes, commencing one poem with a factual accounting that recalls the great story-teller Dickens and the equally great observer Thoreau. In Wild Juice she flexes her own distinctive, straight-ahead narrative skill by mixing her soulful sense of connectedness with a musician's ear for the intricacies of speech, its richness, its idiosyncratic prospects. Hers is a fine-tuned kind of folk music, filled with family wisdom—spirited, playful, witty—but possessed of range that includes a sweeping catalog of subjects from Homo naledi (Star Man) to current-day hospice care, from the coming-of-age 1960s to recent flash-points of Sandy Hook and the rapid 'polar thaw.' Havird writes with canny aptitude of our shared cultural identities, of her family's delights and 'tour[s] of grief,' and of her own reflective self-portraiture, 'bingeing on Cheetos; / osteoarthritis in my knees, hips, toes....' Is she winking a little at Emerson? 'Language,' he wrote, 'is fossil poetry.'"
—David Baker

"Clean, clear, and accurate, Ashley Mace Havird's poems are reportage from the front lines of a life intensely lived. They speak the language of vision—the image, the story, character, a world well and truly seen—and of the visionary: 'a vision—no—a feeling, / the moment he died, of something blasting apart, / sparks raining down.' It is obvious that nothing is lost on the sentience of these poems; but to understand how Havird's mind transforms what otherwise might be ordinary into momentary miracles is to experience, fully, the alchemy of poetry."
—T. R. Hummer

"The 49 poems in Ashley Mace Havird's Wild Juice are written in a somber measure and penetrating voice that seem perfectly tuned to the current moment of pandemic-induced isolation and existential crisis. Together, they conjure an amazing portrait of one woman's exploration of deep internal solitude. While readers of a certain age will easily identify with the many poems which unflinchingly examine the pathos of aging and the role of time, memory, and narrative in fostering acceptance of our fate and that of our loved ones, younger readers will connect with Havird's harrowing take on contemporary real world crises—gun violence, climate change, anti-immigration. Wild Juice is a brave and beautiful book."
—Kate Daniels

"Cross Elizabeth Bishop's eye for observation with Flannery O'Connor's ear for storytelling and you might get Ashley Mace Havird, a poet who grew up on a Southern tobacco farm with a restless intelligence and a steely wit. Look for her star to rise as steadily as Bishop's in the years to come: she is that quietly, astonishingly, enduringly good."
—Julie Kane