Post-Algonquin

Ashley D. Escobar

For Spiral

We are in the shop. The perfect functional beverage should have zero sugaror sugar alternatives. I am a sweetener stuck in perpetual genesis. I don’t haveideas. I just have words. Cherry blossom La Croix tastes like a cherry cordial. Chocolates are for breakfast, but I don’t eat breakfast out of contempt. Is noisedad rock? At least that’s what Thurston asks me. I’d rather play guitar than write. I want to paint layers and layers of noise celestial sound. Whatever happenedto Weldon Kees. I’m a Post Beat It girl. I drive Weldon’s Plymouth Savoy into a lighthouse. I either create or curate chaos. I’m a speed walker fast talker soul stalkerThe “I’s” I employ. The “I’s” I destroy, dissect, control. I’m laboringunder a misconception that everything is cringe. What isn’t cringe. I’ll speak inhieroglyphics. I’ll be prolific after I get the decrepit cat to play piano. We are inthe shop is our mantra. It’s okay to be perfectly disgraceful. I’m perfect. Are youperfect. Walking in New York is like scrolling the internet. Woody’s right about decay.

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Ashley D. Escobar is a literary angel born and raised in San Francisco, residing in New York City. Eileen Myles selected her debut poetry collection GLIB (2025) as the Changes Book Prize winner. She is a high-school dropout who graduated from Bennington College and holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She is working on a novel.

GLIB
Changes Press

Winner of the 2025 Changes Book Prize, selected by Eileen Myles. Ashley 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 talcing 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," this book tells us. There is enough world in the poems that it hardly seems a stretch.

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