HABITATS by Garrett Ashley

Poems

Title: HABITATS
Author: Garrett Ashley
Publisher: Loblolly Press
Publication Year: 2026
ISBN: 9798994308905
Rating: 5 stars

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If you are like me and you live in an urban or suburban area and work on a computer all day and have to drive pretty much everywhere you need to go, I think it is really easy to get disconnected from nature and forget all the ways that we as humans are entwined with the natural world around us. If you don’t have that problem, I envy you.

However, as much as we may try to pretend otherwise, humans are still animals and we are still deeply enmeshed with the natural world around us, which is something that Garrett Ashley does a beautiful job of reminding us in his new poetry collection, HABITATS, which was published earlier this week.

This collection is divided into three sections: Anomalies, A Field Guide to North American Trees (which is also available as a standalone chapbook from Loblolly Press), and Where We Live. To me, the sections read like a spectrum of human/nature interaction. Anomalies felt like it was about humans in the natural world, A Field Guide to North American Trees felt like a perfect melding of humans and the natural world, and Where We Live felt like it was exploring what happens when nature comes into our more domestic spaces. In addition to the gorgeous writing, the thing I really enjoyed about the collection was that “it reads like a world you recognize, until it doesn’t, and that shift is the whole point” (to borrow some words from Andrew Mack’s review of the book). These poems kept me off balance in the most delicious way and I kept looking forward to the ways my expectations would be subverted.

Because the three movements of the book are a bit different (though they flow together nicely), I expected to be able to find a favorite section of the book. Time and time again, I kept reading something and thinking to myself “Oh, this is going to be my favorite part of the book” only to get to the next section and think “No, this is going to be my favorite part.” In the end, I couldn’t find one movement to favor over the others because this is such an excellently written and composed collection and feels so complete as a whole.

It’s hard to narrow it down, but I think my favorite piece in the collection is “Somedays I Go Missing, And Gilligan Pretends to be Me” in the Anomalies section. And yes, it is that Gilligan. The poem is from the point of view of The Skipper from the TV show Gilligan’s Island. While the show is a comedy and makes light of the trials and tribulations our heroes face after the S.S. Minnow’s three-hour tour turns into an unending amount of time spent on a deserted island (the show was cancelled when it expected to go on for another season, so on the show they never make it off the island, even though they eventually do in some of the film sequels). This poem, however, has a more melancholic vibe and seems more realistic to what the castaways might have actually gone through psychologically on the island. I found the poem darkly funny and sad. I was particularly moved when The Skipper is talking about returning to his childhood home only to find it deserted and his family gone. Ashley writes, “…I had this / small boat which I could set sail on / and pretend things didn’t just go away” (26), which is a little sad/funny because then The Skipper and the group get on the boat and they just go away, never to come back. Toward the end of the poem, the speaker also talks about eating seeds “which give us / questions and thoughts we shouldn’t know” (27), which of course reminded me of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and made me question the ways in which Gilligan’s island is both an Edenic paradise, but also similar to the punishment Adam and Eve received when they were cast out of the garden in the same ways the castaways were cast out of their lives. It seems like a silly concept at first, but there is a lot more to unpack about Gilligan’s Island than I previously thought.

If I absolutely had to pick a single movement, A Field Guide to North American Trees was my favorite part of the book. In this section, each poem is named after a tree and is set up like a field guide entry with sections for “description,” “leaves,”“bark,” “twigs,” “flowers,” “fruit,” “habitat,” and “range” and while there is information about the trees in each poem, these poems aren’t only about trees. The poems focus on people and things in the speaker’s life, especially the speaker’s grandmother. Reading this book from an Appalachian lens, I think the figure of the grandmother is important in Appalachian culture as a whole, so I liked the juxtaposition of the idea of the grandmother in combination with trees found in Appalachia. Once again, the language in these poems is breathtaking. For example, in the poem “American Holly,” Ashley writes of the grandmother, “…the last time / I saw her I didn’t know it was the last time / I would see her, and that’s how things should / be, isn’t it—” (33). I felt that section like a punch to the gut (in a good way). It brought up so many questions of mortality and how to lose someone you love. I felt the sentiment echoed again in “Jack Pine” where Ashley writes, “…what can you do for someone / when they’re dying? Take off work?” (39). Again, here I see the dark humor that I read in the Gilligan poem—we are powerless in the face of death, and sometimes that feels a little tragicomic.

In the last section, Where We Live, I felt a pervading sense of nostalgia in all of the poems, and several of them reference nostalgia outright. In “Remember, Objects II,” Ashley writes, “There might be a cure for nostalgia. I thought social media / might be it” (74) and then opens “Remember, Objects III,” with, “When I was old enough, I went in to treat my nostalgia…” (75). This is something that is done really well to make the entire collection feel cohesive. In several instances throughout the book, an idea used toward the end of a poem comes to play early in a following poem. There are recurring characters like the mother and the grandmother. The idea of nostalgia is repeated in the second and third movements. There are significant trees throughout. The third movement seems to reference at least two specific incidents from poems in the first movement. I think this arrangement and this repetition of ideas is a true mark of Ashley’s mastery and the brilliance that went into the way this collection was arranged, which is not always so cleanly done in other poetry collections.

My favorite poem in the third section is “Bird,” and it was actually reading this poem online that made me want to read and review the entire book. This poem is the speaker reflecting on a bird flying into their home and getting trapped before ultimately finding its way back outside (or the speaker only imagines it flying outside—I think there is an argument for the poem being read either way). This is a relatively short poem, but despite its brevity there is still a lot going on here. I think the reader could interpret the poem as covering a whole life from childhood to death and it juxtaposes ideas like fear, beauty, and being lost in a thought provoking way.

But for me, the best part of this poem comes in the last stanza. The last two lines read, “…I know / this will be gone forever” (92), and the vagueness of the “this” and all that can be taken to mean had me thinking about this poem long after I finished it. In Appalachian folklore and superstition, it is said that if a bird flies into your house it is a powerful omen of death or misfortune (it can also mean company is coming, which might feel like misfortune in another way). Reading this poem as someone who knows that, really changed the way I interpreted this poem and especially the last lines. “This” could simply refer to the bird—it flew in and it flew back out and hopefully will not be coming back. It could also refer to just the experience of seeing the bird—the speaker reflects on the images of watching the bird and their imagination of it, and it might mean that the speaker never expects to see something similar or that they will never be able to remember the event exactly as it happened due to the faultiness of memory. However, I read “this” as something bigger like life in general or life as the speaker knows it. I read hints in the poem that it might be talking about the span of a human life and if a bird flying inside presages death, then maybe the speaker is realizing they must face their own mortality. Or maybe if the bird presages the death of someone else or just a misfortune—that will bring a lot of change to the speaker’s life. I think there are a lot of different ways to read and interpret this poem, which is what I love so much about it.

HABITATS is a collection that is full of surprises and gorgeous language. I think every reader can find something in this book that they can relate to, which makes it an excellent read for people who don’t traditionally choose to read poetry. I highly recommend you give it a read.