I am ecstatic to announce that my third poetry collection, Darkest Days and Haunted Ways is now available! It is the companion volume to my second collection, The Withering, which came out in 2020, also from Jackanapes Press.
Darkest Days and Haunted Ways strays away from the heavier supernatural themes in The Withering and focuses more on the emotional sides of grief, trauma, and pain that come with facing illness, dying, and threats of death of a loved one at a young age.
"Gruesome, gory and glorious. Ashley Dioses' latest collection is the splayed corpse of a young poet. Lovers of dark poetry, those fascinated with the whole spectrum of all of death's colors, will find exquisite work in these pages.” —S. L. Edwards, author of In the Devil's Cradle
"Darkest Days and Haunted Ways is sensuous and sensual, grim and madly gay. It evokes primal, hungry rites, and recalls the half-forgotten myths of an ancient feminine who is to be both feared and desired. These poems are the mutterings of a witch-woman deep in her cave, wrapped in bones and roots as she listens to the whisperings of worms. Discomfiting, disturbing, galvanizing, and startling." —Rebecca Buchanan, author of Not a Princess, But (Yes) There Was a Pea and Other Poems to Foment Revolution
"Refracted by the splintered looking-glass of adulthood, Ashley Dioses' Darkest Days and Haunted Ways whispers in the language of teen angst: lachrymose, lyrical, and evocative." —Jessica McHugh, 2x Bram Stoker Award® Nominated author of The Quiet Ways I Destroy You
"In Darkest Days and Haunted Ways, Ashley Dioses exposes the flayed heart of her teenage years, and, in so doing, she reveals some of the origins of the sublime nightshade with which her poetry is filled." —D. L. Myers, author of Oracles from the Black Pool
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Foreword: Autopsy of a Poetess
I. PULSE
Twisted Grin
That Which Builds from Fear
Twitch
So Sick
Pulse
A Pin-Prick
The Resolution
II. TORN UP INSIDE
Misery vs. Happiness
Divine Strength
Locked Within
Torn Up Inside
Just a Glimpse
Confined Within
III. WITHER
Drained
What You Don’t See
Blackout
Sweet Sixteen
Level Unreached
Wither
IV. THE WRATH INSIDE
The Alternate Choice
The Disdain
Shards
Silent Lies
The Wrath Inside
The Fork in the Road
V. EMBRACE THE DARKNESS
Forever Lost
Embrace the Darkness
Cold
When All Things Stop
Afterword
Chronological Order
