Ashes and Amen: A Southern Gothic Book of Poetry Ashes and Amen is Brandi Gann’s fire-branded hymn for the broken, the burned, and the unbeautifully real. These are poems sung with a mouth full of ash and howled from a porch swing beneath a storm-wracked sky. With the fierce lyricism of a woman baptized in heartbreak and defiance, Gann writes of love gone sour as moonshine, of girlhood lost too soon, of reckoning and resurrection. Saints ain’t spared. Devils ain't either. Every stanza claws through sin, survival, and Southern sweetness to find the hard-earned holiness in the breath of an amen. This is for the girls who were bled and burned but still chose to bloom in the sweltering Appalachian sun . This is your altar and your confession, like a last cigarette on the church steps.