Overview

HABITATS is a poetry collection that moves through shared ecosystems-coastal waterways and tidal rivers, fields and flood plains, pine forests, sweltering Southern towns, and rural homesteads-tracing how lives take place under sustained pressure. Across these poems, Garrett Ashley follows how ecology, lived experience, and history gather over time into what we call home, and into both the natural and built environments we share. Structured in three sections, the collection moves from public landscapes into more intimate, lived space. Early poems unfold along beaches, docks, and rivers, where family histories surface alongside labor, inheritance, and absence. At the center of the book, a lyric Field Guide to North American Trees reframes botanical language as a way of understanding how people are shaped. Trees appear not as metaphor alone, but as witnesses to use, extraction, care, and endurance. This section expands the method of Ashley's chapbook A Field Guide to North American Trees, deepening its emotional and narrative reach. The final section turns toward interiors and settlement. Neighbors negotiate fences. Nights stretch thin with noise. Homes bear the marks of wear, improvisation, and temporary shelter. Throughout, landscapes and domestic spaces remain active forces rather than backdrops, shaping how people move through them and what they carry forward. Readers and writers have praised Ashley's work for its precision and attentiveness. William Woolfitt describes his poems as ""polyvocal, uncanny, pulsing with desire,"" while Glenis Redmond notes how his writing invites us to walk alongside the poet, ""rewarded by this trek,"" grounded in the act of witnessing. Angela Ball has written of the ""strange and pungent testament"" found in Ashley's poetic voice-language that lingers long after it's been read. HABITATS, Ashley's debut poetry collection, ultimately gathers its many places into a cumulative reckoning, affirming the fragile conditions through which a life learns its shape and honoring not permanence or protection, but the collective and shared insistence of living.

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Reviews

""From the very start, Garrett Ashley casts a surreal, imagistic spell that pulls the reader in. Habitats is a book in which to become lost and transformed, and one I will read again and again."" Scott Owens, First Poet Laureate of Hickory, NC, and author of twenty-four poetry collections, including Elemental ""With Habitats, Ashley creates a biome of ghosts and memories, showing reverence to naturalism without confusing it for humanity or scholarship."" James Wade, Two-time Spur Award-winning author of All Things Left Wild, Beasts of the Earth, and Narrow the Road ""At times funny and at times a gut punch, these poems weave image and language together to make us feel something."" Caleb Collier, Writer and co-founder of The Forest School and The Institute for Self-Directed Learning ""Ashley brings the reader into close communion with the sometimes dignified and sometimes quirky world of southern forests."" Carolyn Newton, Novelist and author of Songs of the Dead Road ""These poems remind us that trees are not abstractions, but nature's divinity."" Dawn Major, James Dickey Fellow and poet, author of The Bystanders ""Polyvocal and uncanny, these poems pulse with desire."" William Woolfit, Author of Eyes Moving Through the Dark and The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go ""In Ashley's work, the trees speak for themselves."" Angela Ball, Author of Steeplechase and Afterlives of the New York School of Poets, recipient of an NEA Individual Artist Grant ""Moving through the landscapes with exacting precision, Ashley renders each poem ripe with its own telling."" Glenis Redmond, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Greenville, South Carolina, and author of The Song of Everything ""Reading Garrett Ashley's poems, I feel thrown off balance in the best way possible: the familiar is made strange, the known southern landscape freshly engaged in a project of exploration and recovery."" Jennifer Horne, Twelfth Poet Laureate of Alabama, 2017-2021 and winner of the 2025 Hall-Waters Prize for Excellence in Southern Writing. ""Garrett Ashley's lyrical and unflinching poems continue to follow me as I move through my own habitats and landscapes."" Andrew Malan Milward, Author of I Was a Revolutionary and You Are Loved, winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction and the Nilsen Literary Prize.

Author Information

Garrett Ashley's work has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Normal School, Sonora Review, Analog SF&F, DIAGRAM, Reed Magazine, and Sequestrum. He earned his PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers and teaches creative writing at Tuskegee University in Alabama. He is also the author of Peraphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions (Press 53, 2024), A Field Guide to North American Trees (Good Printed Things, 2025), and Habitats (Loblolly Press, 2026).

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