This Ghostly Poetry

The Spanish Civil War was idealized as a poet’s war. The thousands of poems written about the conflict are memorable evidence of poetry’s high cultural and political value in those historical conditions. After Franco’s victory and the repression that followed, numerous Republican exiles relied on the symbolic agency of poetry to uphold a sense of national identity. Exilic poems are often read as claim-making narratives that fit national literary history. This Ghostly Poetry critiques this conventional understanding of literary history by arguing that exilic poems invite readers to seek continuity with a traumatic past just as they prevent their narrative articulation. The book uses the figure of the ghost to address temporal challenges to historical continuity brought about by memory, tracing the discordant, disruptive ways in which memory is interwoven with history in poems written in exile. Taking a novel approach to cultural memory, This Ghostly Poetry engages with literature, history, and politics while exploring issues of voice, time, representation, and disciplinarity.

Winner of the Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Prize

Winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Major Jackson The stub of your left leg dangles as I hold you up, my hands inserted under your arms like a child. You are complaining about the itch, the burn; scratch the ghost of your calf and heel. —from "Scratching the Ghost" Dexter L. Booth's ruminations on loss in this award-winning debut are rooted in a time past but one still palpable and persistent. Here are memories of love lost, family mourned, a father absent, ghosts of hometowns and childhood. Here too is a "Short Letter to the Twentieth Century" and, finally, a "Long Letter to the Twentieth Century," as if across this collection the poet is mustering up the force to speak back to history. "In Dexter Booth's Scratching the Ghost, a cracked egg means the universe is splitting, the slap of a double-dutch rope is a broken-throated hymn, and splitting a squealing hog is akin to lovemaking. These are poems loyal to their own intrepid logic and reckless plausibility. Yet, lest the reader get too giddy in a fun house of mirrors, here, too, are the melodic laments and remarkable lyric passages of a poet who acknowledges the infinite current of melancholy that underlines his journey." —Major Jackson

This collection highlights the complexities of fatherhood and how to raise young kids while bearing witness to the charged movements of social injustice and inequities of race in America. Memory, culpability, and our very humanness course through this book and strip us down to find joy and inspiration amid the darkness.

Spooky light-verse poems featuring otherworldly creatures and things: witches and warlocks, the 'Creeping Crud' and a cannibal's fingery fondue, fictional characters such as Dr. Jekyll and Medusa, and more.

"Maginnes effortlessly merges the experimental and the metaphysical, the erotic and the spiritual."-Peter Johnson

In her latest collection of English-language poems, trilingual Romanian-American poet Stella Vinitchi Radulescu continues to explore the capabilities and limits of language itself as the nexus where thought and physicality meet. Gathering fragments of idea and image from a vast constellation of influences, Radulescu's nimble, ever-surprising poems weave a tapestry that embodies what it feels like to be both intensely alive and knowingly transient. Publishers Weeklycalls these meditative, metaphysical poems that are rewardingly dense with surprising turns and images.

From the Mediterranean to the American West, the poems in Ron Smith's new collection move across time and place to find reliable truths through personal observation. Beyond his own experiences Smith draws from the lives of notable and diverse figures -- Edward Teller, Edgar Allan Poe, Mickey Mantle, Ezra Pound, Robert Penn Warren, Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl, and many others. Its Ghostly Workshop probes the fallibility of philosophy while strengthening the quest for certainty. Wondering and weighing, these are poems capable of conviction as well as doubt. Like the city of Rome, the subject at the book's center, Its Ghostly Workshop aims to rewire us, to "virus" us, to "rush" us "with visionary blazes, cascades / of memory, incandescent logic."

In Dear Ghosts, the ghosts of the past are conjured and communed with as part of the poet's present day: the deceased beloved, the father long dead, the ailing mother, the victims of Holocaust and war. With these spirits beside her, Gallagher confronts her own illness and mortality and celebrates new love and friendship in these spare lyrics and sprawling narratives, each punctuated by her feisty resilience and signature grace.

These poems run the gamut between human striving and suffering, ultimately imbued with a tenacious hope