GLIB
GLIB
By Ashley D. Escobar
Publication date: May, 2025
ISBN# 979-8-9889042-8-1
6 x 9” 80pp Paperback
$24.99
Winner, 2024 Changes Book Prize, selected by Eileen Myles
Ashley D. Escobar botanizes the parking lots of Bob’s Big Boy, Cumbies, and Brick Oven Pizza, mining limestone quarries and plastic factories for material for her sparkling, knowing, and fast-paced debut. GLIB is flush with characters and cultural touchstones, other poets, novelists, musicians, directors. “They are very crowded poems, there’s lots of stuff but I don’t get full,” Eileen Myles writes in their preface. Not sardonic, not moralizing, never jaded or didactic, sometimes tender, sometimes cutting, not indifferent but also not taking it personally, Escobar’s poems proceed by marking—usually without further remark, never forcing an insight or observation, just pointing out, glibly—the myriad contradictions, miracles, incoherences, and indignities that make up their world. And still, the nervy syntax and insouciant attitude give way to occasions of pure equipoise, as in the final moments of an eight-line poem that ends, simply, perfectly, “I love being alive with you.”
“The world we write is the world we live in,” Escobar tells us. There is enough world in these poems that it hardly seems a stretch.
Ashley D. Escobar is a writer and filmmaker from San Francisco, residing in New York City. Her first poetry chapbook, SOMETIMES, came out with Invisible Hand Press in 2021. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and is the co-editor of Wind-up Mice. Her words have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, the London Magazine, Hobart, and elsewhere. GLIB is her first book.
Praise for GLIB
“Ashley Escobar’s GLIB is a brilliant debut, a tail-gating of versified New York forms for a joyride, knowing ‘death [will] come in cherry DumDum wrappers.’ Each dose props against the grips of being alive. Escobar’s poems have ‘a carrier pigeon heart,’ a roving disposition, joys of early-life love, perpetual newness, ‘kisses in daytime television static,’ and memories where ‘we traded snowflake blisters.’ These poems are not blithe rumination, idle politic critique, nor tedious studies of cerebral inhabitance. Instead, they carry the breath that keeps one vital and moving, because with Ashley’s poems ‘the world we write is the world we live in’ and the effortless transience proves that details still light up the mind.”
–Edmund Berrigan, author of More Gone
“Ashley Escobar’s GLIB is a love letter to a pundit’s bite — with a rapier-quick ear Escobar illuminates cultural artifacts like star systems on speed dial, ‘I’m a Post Beat It girl,’ implicating algorithms as post-party mantras with effortless ‘Is this Twee, is this avant-garde?’ Every encounter is her muse, walking a lenticular language where motion is in the ‘where cold winter air is honest air.’ Escobar captures the bliss of a poet’s burden ‘I don’t know how I feel, about being everything,’ a Polaroid reckoning that refuses spectacle. GLIB is an effortlessly tender yet razor sharp debut, claiming, ‘aren’t we the blueprint?’— indeed, our walk with hers, just started.”
—Edwin Torres, author of XoeteoX
“Ashley Escobar’s GLIB is ‘laboring under the misconception that everything is cringe.’ Yet, beneath the late-internet speak and absurdist imagery, a lovely sincerity emerges. This sparkling debut—which takes us from Brooklyn to California to Berlin—crackles with wit and realness, heartbreak and desire.”
–Anna Dorn, author of Perfume and Pain