By A.V. Christie

A.V. Christie's posthumously assembled New and Selected Poems 

Available from:  Ashland Bookstore  |  Amazon 

Praise for More Here Than Light:

A.V. Christie was a poet of pleasure and hurt, enthralled by the intensity of nearness of many kinds, large and small, a Niagara Falls or a chicken’s beak.  Her line “The beauty now of what’s hidden” tells us what she worked to find, not just the beauty but the hiddenness.  Her work practically quivers with excited attentiveness to what’s close but invisible.  Her great gift was to reveal such things to us.

- W. S. Di Piero

A.V. Christie’s posthumously assembled, intriguingly titled More Here Than Light: New & Selected Poems is a deeply satisfying memorial to the work of a poet whose poems I have always loved for their bright inventiveness, the muscular buoyancy of their language, their habits of thought, and their engagement with the world. Despite the knowledge of her own mortally challenged life, of having to persist in what she calls the chiaroscuro of grief, Christie can again and again accelerate into an idiom of grateful praise, feeling the good fortune of all the lovely ways/ you've been spared, keeping a tenacious, lasting hold on her own bright lyrical impulses.  Turning her deep curiosity about the world into lyric glimpses, she asks in one late poem Am I alive or dead?/ Is this a dream or an afterlife? The poems gathered in this volume grant the poet a decisive, poetically understood after-life.

- Eamon Grennan

The poems in More Here Than Light are full of hard-won truths, in which the intensity of the poet’s experience is supported by language, phrasing, syntax, and structure.  Reading these poems is to watch A.V. Christie growing, evolving, taking risks, and writing, in the most honest, unflinching way possible, about the pressing concerns of life’s successive stages: the formation and disintegration of families, the beginning and end of a marriage, the bond between mother and child, the exigencies of artistic making, and finally, the painful confrontation with her own mortality.  There are no evasions.  Christie’s poetic ‘task,’ as I imagine it, was to come to a deeper understanding of herself and the external forces which shaped her life and the lives of those around her.  She succeeds admirably and unforgettably.

- Elizabeth Spires, author of A Memory of the Future

About the Author:

A.V. Christie (1963-2016) was the author of Nine Skies (University of Illinois Press), which won the National Poetry Series; The Housing, winner of the McGovern Prize (Ashland Poetry Press); and the chapbooks The Wonders (Seven Kitchens Press) and And I Began to Entertain Doubts (Folded Word Press).  Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Poetry, Commonweal, AGNI, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner and many other reviews. She was a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania and Maryland State Arts Councils and was a visiting writer at Villanova and LaSalle universities, Bryn Mawr College, Goucher College, the University of Maryland and Penn State Abington.