Just Ash is a book of poetry written over the course of a year. If you notice the subtle changes in the prominence of your cheekbone, elasticity of your skin, if you feel a general decline in excitability over mass catastrophe, then you are tuned in to the passage of time. Before time passes too quickly, we can capture it in word, in print. This book of poems is the eleventh book by Gabriel Leif Bellman, who still does not get it. Or maybe he does. This book is the equivalent of a look in the mirror by a bottle of whiskey, poured over a fire, on a sinking ship. What does a flame see while it burns? What is left of us when we die?
