Ashley D. Escobar, GLIB

 

“I do this, I do that. I steal saltine crackers.” It’s not necessarily one of her great lines but one I really like. One doesn’t expect much for a send up of Frank O’Hara but Ashley has triumphed here by doing less. I personally love saltines but stealing them is not great. Or it is great. It just doesn’t matter. It’s a kind of slap. I think that’s a part of what’s going on. She makes these micro adjustments of order or kinds of discourse that end a chain of meaning so slightly. They provoke a mild what, it’s like a bump, one of my favorite things in poetry. It’s like the materiality of artifice that has to do with defining places as being here by the fact that so subtly you say they are no more.

Her poems are very thingy. That’s what I meant by stuff. The world is constantly named. And framed. Also when I was saying that they don’t make me full, I mean that even though there’s streams and streams of references and details none really matter, the experience is how we glide through them swinging from vine to vine, that’s why fast or slow it’s exactly the same. You don’t see more either way. It is the culture or cultures kinda. There’s no inside, there’s no outside. (Eileen Myles, “Glibbest of the GLIB”)

I’m startled by how much I enjoyed New York City/San Francisco-based poet and filmmaker Ashley D. Escobar’s full-length poetry debut GLIB (Manhattan NY: Changes, 2025), winner of the Changes Book Prize, as selected by Eileen Myles. The sixth book published to date by the press, Escobar’s GLIB offers poems composed across first-person accumulative sweeps of precise moments, of, as Myles suggests, a concrete thingness, even if those things might lean into the abstract or the metaphysical. “should I // fuck // up this deli sandwich,” she writes, to close the poem “Joyride,” “glossier you sticks to all cardigans // the suburbs are not // the end of all things // I am [.]” Escobar’s poems provide a wealth of delightful, stellar lines, composing magical moments that sparkle across these Frank O’Hara-esque narratives. The sparkles they do sparkle, and accumulate into a clear-headed thoughtfulness, especially across stretches that, in another hand, could read as a meandering kind of chaos; through Escobar, the waywardness is precisely the point, the means through which her poems find purpose, joyful dissonance, deep heart and chipped wisdom. As the poem “Wake Bake Get Laid” begins: “Everything – is orange – I am your unresolved – sonnet – Let’s get a shot – of my existential ennui – on the second floor – of Duane Reade – These are the end times – East Coast wildfire – season to follow – train derailment – The stores have run out – of mini – composition notebooks [.]” While purposefully glib, the glib of her GLIB is simultaneous foundation and red herring, allowing the poems a kind of freedom to talk about the real, in-between all the casual dismissals.

With more than a couple of O’Hara references throughout—“I was walking down 2^nd ave when the intangible turned tangible I thought I saw Frank O’Hara’s ghost so I looked  up at the trees they were all wearing sunglasses and the spaces in between the branches were spectacles of their own right Aidan told me to say hi to Frank but I didn’t know him or maybe I did except I’ve never liked coke very much I’d rather have a pepsi and disappear […],” begins the poem “April”—Escobar certainly presents multiple breathless, even staccato, O’Hara-esque “I did this, I did that” narrative trajectories, but one that holds less a narrative through-line than a series of rhythmic, operatic gestures, a flaneur of concrete abstract first-person meditation, swagger and exploration. “I’m a morning / and an evening person.” she writes, near the end of the poem “Roey’s,” “Afternoons eat me alive.” Or, as the sixth part of the seven-poem sequence “Potato of the Earth” reads:

coming and going
dropping your joint
first into a trash can
then off my balcony
leftover power bowl for
breakfast you know
you’re allowed to eat
in my bed and clap
backwards to the cats
on the street the poet
onstage and I simultaneously
thought of blackout curtains
I wish everything was sheer just
text me when you’re ready