Ashley Seitz Kramer

Ashley Seitz Kramer's Proxemics measure the taut distance between the self and other. They limn the space between self-awareness and the flow of experience. They pursue emotional honesty beyond the point of disintegration to renewal. The speaker in these poems, like Dickinson's “Vesuvius at Home,” enacts explosive emotions in crystalline language, showing how mindfulness makes grief, rage, and love bearable by bringing them into perfectly clear focus. — Lance Newman

“Fluctuating accuracy” isn’t all we have, isn’t the best we can do. In Ashley Seitz Kramer’s Proxemics, it is evidence of going through it. It is also what now is in a poem. These poems don’t struggle with language failing and time passing. They take the difficulty of living and art-making in the now and show how a lyrical moment isn’t a framed one. How lucky are poems to work in the impossible now. Grief, isolation, memory can restrict that fluctuating accuracy, but in Proxemics, the poet does not set a table: “[D]oes / fake fruit make you strangely full & sad too? Do you / imagine biting into it & breaking a tooth, or worse, / finding it easier & easier to chew?” — Carrie Oeding

Octavio Paz writes that “readers of poems worm their way into immeasurable realities and in the mirrors of words discover their own infinity.” Ashley Seitz Kramer's poems begin in one place and end in another, entirely different, a place illuminated by the wisdom of distance. There's no better guide to infinity than one who makes such travel her “holy business / knowing where to put each thing.” Museum of Distance engrosses and enriches those lucky enough to enter. — Natasha Sajé