Gold Light Shining

Published by Banshee Press

Within five minutes, I knew
I loved the stranger in my head.

In her debut collection of poetry, Bebe Ashley spins gold from the detritus of the internet. A landscape often depicted as a wasteland is illuminated in poems that explore celebrity, obsession, sexuality, coming of age, and that charismatic enigma, Harry Styles.

Inspired by sources as diverse as Styles’s track listings, Scandi webseries Skam, and One Direction newsletters, Ashley spins us across continents on a tour of the surreal highs and absurd lows of celebrity culture. These are poems of youth and yearning, yet they’re suffused with the hard-won wisdom that the communities we build can be as meaningful as the families we’re born into.

Perceptive, witty, and exuberant, Gold Light Shining introduces an essential new voice; one that captures how pop culture’s Technicolor joy disrupts our greyscale world.

Buy Gold Light Shining from Banshee Press

Non-Fiction

I have always enjoyed opening post. When I was younger, I would wait by the letterbox in the mornings. On days that the postman stopped, I would literally pull the letters from his hands; each of us standing on one side of the closed door. Sometimes, the soft skin on the back of my fingers was bruised by the sharp metal snapback of the letterbox as I waited for the postman to relinquish the letters over the threshold, him entirely unaware I was already holding them close.
— Limbs and Things, RTÉ Radio 1 The Prompt

“Once you start learning Braille, you slowly see it everywhere. It’s on the packets of paracetamol at the pharmacy, next to the buttons in the lift, close to the handle on the office door. That isn’t to say Braille is superfluous. It should be much more readily available, in museums, in libraries, in tourist offices and train stations.”


— In the pandemic I learned to Read Again, Trumpet Issue 10

“"Tusind tak!" just happens to be my favourite thank you. A thousand thank yous seems just enough for everyday use, and more than we ever give in English. I’d give you another thousand thank yous for believing me to be a native Danish speaker. A thousand more for not laughing when I said it was the proudest moment of my life and that I was trying to improve my accent.”

— Letter to the twentysomething running the bagel shop in the Faroe Islands

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