"I know these woods, these / aging pines well; their gaze has blessed me before / when I wasn't looking." Reaching back into a love for nature and travel, Ashley Malin's poetry collection, Uncharted Shores meditates on childhood memory, vulnerability, grief, intimacy, darkness, and life's mysteries in four parts. Her questioning faith reoccurs through allusions to darkness in its different forms: in winter, homesickness, sensuality, self-doubt, death, and into the light of rebirth. She pays homage to the loss of a beloved friend to cancer and their shared connection to the open shore, "I think of you / is that not prayer?" She celebrates the newfound play of friendship and love with another as a source of deepening spirituality, "Is listening not a form of giving / of blessing the space / between us / to hear you unbound as you are?" Through each of these poems, prayer, hope, sorrow, praise, joy is each welcomed as a source of wonder, of "all that is becoming."
