Winner of Sarabande Books 2020 Series in Kentucky Literature & the 2022 International Rubery Book Award in Nonfiction
Available at Bookshop and Barnes & Noble
Two weeks before her grandfather purchased a gun, Ashley Marie Farmer's grandmother tripped as she walked across their living room. It was a swift accident on an ordinary day: her chin hit the floor; her cervical spine shattered. She asked, "I'm paralyzed, aren't I?" Later, thinking to put her out of her misery, he kissed his sleeping wife of sixty-three years and shot her in the chest. He tried to shoot himself too, but the weapon broke apart in his hands. He was immediately arrested. This is the scene we are greeted with at the outset of Farmer's stunning collection of hybrid essays. One of its greatest features is the variety of voices, a kaleidoscopic approach that corrals in autobiography, audio transcripts, media, legal documents, internet comments, short prose pieces, and more. The result is a moving, deeply satisfying, and eye-opening story. Ashley Marie Farmer is a profound writer who is clearly here to stay, her voice a true gift to our times.
"Poet Farmer (The Women) parses her complicated family history to create a heart-wrenching portrait of love, family, loss, and aging in this astounding collection.....In 'Mercy,' she writes, 'while I’m skeptical of mining beauty from pain... or landing on a diamond takeaway or even claiming good can come from it, I’ve learned that time-freezing anguish makes for micro-moments of unexpected reverence.' Farmer exceeds her intention; the moments she depicts teem with power. This potent work introduces Farmer as a writer to watch."
―Publishers Weekly starred review
"This cataclysmic event ― a very public story collides with a family's specific, private loss ― is the axis around which Farmer's meditations and explorations of guilt, place, grief and violence revolve, in memorable essays that take both traditional and experimental forms. Interspersed throughout are fascinating transcripts of interviews she recorded earlier with both grandparents, allowing them to be known on the page as the dynamic, loving couple they were."
―Erin Keane, Salon, "Favorite Books of 2022"
"Dear Damage plumbs devastating loss, family, grief, gun violence, and love―all with glittering tenderness. Ashley Marie Farmer’s mind is vast and complex, and her compassion stuns as she makes 'a quiet study of pain' while acknowledging that 'maybe pain has made a study of me.' These essays leave me aching and awestruck."
―Gina Nutt, author of Night Rooms
"Dear Damage is many things at once: an expertly written collection of literary essays, the riveting story of an unfathomable act of violence, a work of breathtaking empathy, a sublime and generous account of love and grief, and the account of an enormously talented writer's self-creation. Together, they assemble into a book that is somehow all of that and more: a marvel, a reckoning, possibly a miracle."
―Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun
“Prose in the hands of a poet, Dear Damage is 'radiant and unabridged,' a story of love and violence set within the incoherence of American values. Rarely are readers gifted with the work of a mind equally incisive as it is elegant. Ashley Marie Farmer’s important Dear Damage speaks to all times from within the salience of our own particular troubled American now.”
―Michelle Latiolais, author of She and Widow
Available at Bookshop and Barnes & Noble
Two weeks before her grandfather purchased a gun, Ashley Marie Farmer's grandmother tripped as she walked across their living room. It was a swift accident on an ordinary day: her chin hit the floor; her cervical spine shattered. She asked, "I'm paralyzed, aren't I?" Later, thinking to put her out of her misery, he kissed his sleeping wife of sixty-three years and shot her in the chest. He tried to shoot himself too, but the weapon broke apart in his hands. He was immediately arrested. This is the scene we are greeted with at the outset of Farmer's stunning collection of hybrid essays. One of its greatest features is the variety of voices, a kaleidoscopic approach that corrals in autobiography, audio transcripts, media, legal documents, internet comments, short prose pieces, and more. The result is a moving, deeply satisfying, and eye-opening story. Ashley Marie Farmer is a profound writer who is clearly here to stay, her voice a true gift to our times.
"Poet Farmer (The Women) parses her complicated family history to create a heart-wrenching portrait of love, family, loss, and aging in this astounding collection.....In 'Mercy,' she writes, 'while I’m skeptical of mining beauty from pain... or landing on a diamond takeaway or even claiming good can come from it, I’ve learned that time-freezing anguish makes for micro-moments of unexpected reverence.' Farmer exceeds her intention; the moments she depicts teem with power. This potent work introduces Farmer as a writer to watch."
―Publishers Weekly starred review
"This cataclysmic event ― a very public story collides with a family's specific, private loss ― is the axis around which Farmer's meditations and explorations of guilt, place, grief and violence revolve, in memorable essays that take both traditional and experimental forms. Interspersed throughout are fascinating transcripts of interviews she recorded earlier with both grandparents, allowing them to be known on the page as the dynamic, loving couple they were."
―Erin Keane, Salon, "Favorite Books of 2022"
"Dear Damage plumbs devastating loss, family, grief, gun violence, and love―all with glittering tenderness. Ashley Marie Farmer’s mind is vast and complex, and her compassion stuns as she makes 'a quiet study of pain' while acknowledging that 'maybe pain has made a study of me.' These essays leave me aching and awestruck."
―Gina Nutt, author of Night Rooms
"Dear Damage is many things at once: an expertly written collection of literary essays, the riveting story of an unfathomable act of violence, a work of breathtaking empathy, a sublime and generous account of love and grief, and the account of an enormously talented writer's self-creation. Together, they assemble into a book that is somehow all of that and more: a marvel, a reckoning, possibly a miracle."
―Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun
“Prose in the hands of a poet, Dear Damage is 'radiant and unabridged,' a story of love and violence set within the incoherence of American values. Rarely are readers gifted with the work of a mind equally incisive as it is elegant. Ashley Marie Farmer’s important Dear Damage speaks to all times from within the salience of our own particular troubled American now.”
―Michelle Latiolais, author of She and Widow
Stories from Apocalypse Party Press, reissued in 2022
Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble
A girl drinks river water that gives her good advice but a bad reputation. A young woman's job at a make-up counter ends in disaster. Car accidents and cornfields cause siblings to disappear while, up above, airplane banners advertise hair care products. Welcome to Beside Myself, Ashley Farmer's debut collection of short stories. These brief, lucid dreams illuminate the moment the familiar becomes strange and that split second before everything changes forever.
Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and Barnes & Noble
A girl drinks river water that gives her good advice but a bad reputation. A young woman's job at a make-up counter ends in disaster. Car accidents and cornfields cause siblings to disappear while, up above, airplane banners advertise hair care products. Welcome to Beside Myself, Ashley Farmer's debut collection of short stories. These brief, lucid dreams illuminate the moment the familiar becomes strange and that split second before everything changes forever.
Poetry collection from Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016
Available from Amazon
“Reading Ashley Farmer’s The Women is like reading a cubist painting. These scavenged voices collide, contradict, entertain, horrify, and surprise as they create a dizzying and complex conversation about what it means to be a woman at this particular moment in time. In poems that are by turns witty, beautiful, and moving, Farmer investigates the disturbing chasm between how women are seen and how they see themselves. Even as she unapologetically documents the power that systemic oppression has over our daily lives, her women emerge as brave, hungry, and resilient. The Women simultaneously made my blood boil and made me feel less alone.”
―Megan Martin, author of Nevers
"Ashley Farmer's The Women unearths the disgusting sludge in language via Google / via thinking. It arranges that sludge into poetry / exposes it / plays with it / works with its brutality. What happens / what continues to happen when language gets close to the varied, ever expanding lives of bodies that identify as women? What to do with that pain / the wound of continuing to be told, via suffocating / sickening pinch, who you are and what you deserve? 'Have you heard the joke / about how women are like volcanoes: / calm before exploding / and killing everything?' It never stops being difficult to continue to face how small we imagine each other to be. But we must keep doing it. The Women by Ashley Farmer insists that we do it / for ourselves / for each other / for bodies and lives and futures we have yet to believe in."
―Carrie Lorig, author of Pulp vs. Throne
―Megan Martin, author of Nevers
"Ashley Farmer's The Women unearths the disgusting sludge in language via Google / via thinking. It arranges that sludge into poetry / exposes it / plays with it / works with its brutality. What happens / what continues to happen when language gets close to the varied, ever expanding lives of bodies that identify as women? What to do with that pain / the wound of continuing to be told, via suffocating / sickening pinch, who you are and what you deserve? 'Have you heard the joke / about how women are like volcanoes: / calm before exploding / and killing everything?' It never stops being difficult to continue to face how small we imagine each other to be. But we must keep doing it. The Women by Ashley Farmer insists that we do it / for ourselves / for each other / for bodies and lives and futures we have yet to believe in."
―Carrie Lorig, author of Pulp vs. Throne
Collaboration with video artist Claire Krüeger, excerpted from The Women at TriQuarterly
Wings and Wires from TriQuarterly on Vimeo.