Biography
Ashley Obscura is a Canadian-Mexican poet, publisher, and editor whose work is devoted to expanding poetry across platforms, formats, and communities. With a deep interest in where poetics meet technology, she explores how language can live and move through page, screen, and sound. She is the author of two English poetry collections — Ambient Technology and I Am Here — and her writing has been translated and published in Argentina, Peru, Spain, Romania, and Germany.
She is the founder and managing editor of award-winning Metatron Press, an independent literary publishing house dedicated to experimental writing by emerging authors. Through Metatron, she has worked on over 50 books, organized 50+ poetry events, and led a range of projects including The Metatron Prize, GLYPHÖRIA, ÖMEGÄ, and the poet-interview podcast Metacösm. She is also a co-founder of the new media studio Apocablyss, where she writes for digital and immersive experiences such as Museum of Symmetry (NFB), Songs of the Lost, and Oceanarium. In 2019, Museum of Symmetry won a Canadian Screen Award for Best Virtual Reality Game.
Her work has been featured at literary festivals, in classrooms, and through public talks and workshops across Canada and internationally. She is committed to creating space for poetry that feels alive, accessible, and relevant — particularly for youth, emerging writers, and those whose voices are often left out of traditional literary spaces.
Originally from Saskatoon (Treaty 6 Territory), Ashley has lived in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal for over 16 years.
Micro-interview
I discovered my love of poetry in grade 10. I was lucky enough to have a lover of poetry as an English teacher and to go to a high school that offered a Creative Writing class. I remember one of my first poetry classes was devoted to dissecting the meaning of e. e. cummings’ poem “since feeling is first.” I talked the whole class and was fascinated by the realm of metaphor expressed in the poem. This excited me very much. Poetry seemed, to me, to be some sort of puzzle similar to math, but composed of words, sentiment, and feeling.
since feeling is first
e. e. cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
– the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
I started mimicking poetry in elementary school when I disovered the books of Shel Silverstein, particularily “Where The Sidewalk Ends.” I loved how poetry pointed to this mysterious, magical, internal world that was not visible to the eye.
Learning to write poetry, for me, required a lot of impersonation of writers I admired. I moved in and out of a lot of impersonation before I stumbled upon my own voice and was able to comfortably refer to my self as a poet. I didn’t start introducing my self as a poet until I had completed my undergrad in Creative Writing from Concordia University at the age of 24, although I always considered my self a poet in my mind.
A poet’s job is to synthesize an experience of life into language.
“Regardless” by Aisha Sasha John.
