Description
Ashley Seitz Kramer
Free Verse Editions
Edited by Jon Thompson
Release Date: 5 January 2027.
Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-647-5 (paperback, $16.95); 978-1-64317-648-2 (PDF, $9.95); 978-1-64317-649-9 (EPUB, $9.95). © 2027 by Parlor Press, 74 pages.
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Praise for Proxemics
“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, author of Our List of Solutions and If I Could Give You a Line
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 of 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, author of Proverbs of Earth
About the Author
Ashley Seitz Kramer has an MFA in writing from Vermont College and a PhD in education from the University of Utah. Her creative work has been published in over 35 literary journals such as The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Quarterly West, Passages North, The Southeast Review, The Cimarron Review, Hunger Mountain, Western Humanities Review, Slice Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Burnside Review, Atlanta Review, Harpur Palate, and Grist. She’s also won numerous awards, including the Ruth Stone Prize, the Robert and Adele Schiff Award, the Mountain West Writers' Award, and the Rash Award. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she was a finalist for a Ruth Lily Fellowship, the Utah Book Award, and the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Her first book, Museum of Distance (2015), won the Zone 3 Press First Book Award.
Photograph of the author by Eric Kramer. Used by permission.