Balcony buffalo

Confident and ready, Ashleigh A. Allen’s poems treat myth and story, rhyme and sound as the material for ancestral exploration. “Balcony buffalo” exhibits a deft use of prose-poem structures and phrasal-sentence tension. Frequent use of assonance and sibilance, concrete language, and a startling diction reveals a narrative which slowly develops through “clusters of curses” and “dice and discomfort.” Language here expertly rolls around the mouth, unfurling “true trumpets” of crumpled consonants.