Southern Messenger Poets

In Wild Juice, the poet and novelist Ashley Mace Havird confronts global and personal change. Her subjects range from the extinction of a prehuman species to the present-day reduction in sea life due to the climate crisis. Closer to home, she confronts the death of her father and her own aging.

Running throughout these lyrics of loss is the richness of communal life, a current of hope given substance by the juice of wild grapes that baptizes the poet’s chin and that of her elderly father, whose presence haunts the book. Havird’s poems move from sea coasts to the rural South to landlocked suburbia, in language characterized by wit, pluck, and ironic candor.

Through striking evocations of the natural world, conveyed in a voice steeped in mature human experience, Wild Juice speaks memorably on behalf of a life that embraces us all.