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.
