ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Caroline Rash, daughter of novelist and professor Ron Rash, recently published “Because the bullet arrives,” her debut work of poetry. Like her father, Rash’s words are steeped with Southern humidity and literary beauty, but her poetry marks the arrival of a unique, powerful voice all her own.

Playing with form

While “Because the bullet arrives,” a collection of 19 poems, was written over the course of a decade, the themes of the book are timeless.

“I would hope it gestures at big questions,” Caroline Rash said. “Like, how does one live, how do we live, when there’s so much suffering in the world? When we’re mortal, when we’re grieving, how do we find acceptance and just live through those things?”

Despite the weighty themes behind the poems, “Because the bullet arrives” is infused with a kind of playfulness, too. The way Caroline Rash structured each of the poems in her collection varied tremendously from page to page, lending an energetic, jazzy rhythm to her chapbook.

“I experiment with form a lot. I pay a lot of attention to form,” Caroline Rash explained.

In a few of the poems, the spacing of a line was part of the storytelling itself. In “Cast,” which features periodic gaps of blank space in the middle of its verse, Caroline Rash said the gaps were meant to express the “loneliness of childhood” and the incomplete nature of memory.

“I had a great childhood in a lot of ways, but it was a lot of time roaming around in the woods unsupervised,” she said. “I felt like that needed a lot of space in it to convey that airiness, like the disconnect of all these episodic memories.”

She takes that and it becomes something just incredibly imaginative.

The poet has a different approach to form on almost every single page of “Because the bullet arrives.”

In her poem “in a time of need,” Caroline Rash expressed a lovely evocation of aging and partnership with only one to three words per line. In “Entry wound,” she captured a young boy’s hunting trip with an alternating series of stanzas leapfrogging from the left to the middle of the page. In “The Birds,” a series of six poems, she presented a flock of window screen-stealing birds in strictly structured sonnets.

“She has some poems where the birds are taking the window screens, and she takes that and and it becomes something just incredibly imaginative,” said Ron Rash. “I thought, that’s the kind of poem I can’t do. She was able to take that and almost make it like a myth, you know? That kind of level.”

While Caroline Rash said she does not frequently write autobiographical poetry, “The Birds” is an acutely funny example of her life seen through a fictitious lens.

“I noticed one day during the lockdown, during COVID, the birds were stealing, literally stealing, all of our window screens to build their nest. My partner and I were like, ‘uh, should we stop them? What’s going on?'” Caroline Rash laughed. “We agreed to just let the birds take the window screens, and they’re all gone now, basically. They’re all shredded. But anyway, it became a bunch of sonnets.”

Rash roots

Following in her father’s footsteps, Caroline Rash knew she wanted to be a writer from an early age.

“I knew I wanted to be a writer almost from as long ago as I can remember, probably like four or five years old,” Caroline Rash recalled. “My idea of what a writer was was someone who woke up at like 5 a.m before he would be a parent to me and my brother, before he would go to work at the community college, before he would work out.”

The poet remembered understanding writing as hard work from the beginning, whether it was seeing her dad open rejection letters at the kitchen table or find scraps of time to work amid the regular bustle of family life. 

“I saw that version of writing, which was a grind,” Caroline Rash explained.

At the same time as she was observing him, Caroline Rash’s father was watching her. Years later, Ron Rash still recollects the moment he realized his daughter would be a writer.

“She was three years old and my wife, her mother, Anne, went into her room,” Ron Rash said. “Caroline, I think, came and got her and said she wanted to show Anne something. And she went in, she’d been crying. Caroline had been crying. And she said, ‘Mom, I don’t want to sleep on those sad spots.’ That’s where the tears had fallen.

“I thought, okay, that brain is working in a way that I think, as a creative writer, you want it to work. I mean, that’s creativity,” Ron Rash marveled.

Caroline Rash’s mother, an English teacher, was also a major influence on the poet, particularly when it came to the chosen decor of the Rash family home: books.

“I still have never been to a house with as many books as ours,” Caroline Rash said. “My mom is an English teacher. My dad is obviously a writer and an English professor. There’s always been books everywhere.”

Today, Caroline Rash is an educator and a writer, just like her parents. Her debut work of poetry, “Because the bullet arrives,” can be found at Malaprop’s Bookstore in downtown Asheville or at www.redhawkpublications.com.

“Teaching, it’s a rewarding career, but it’s also a grind,” Caroline Rash laughed. “I saw both of those and somehow ended up doing both.”

“She was warned on both fronts,” Ron Rash quipped.

For more information about Caroline, visit www.carolinerash.com.

For more information about Ron Rash, visit www.ronrashwriter.com.