Liberal Arts Faculty Books

Dear Weather Ghost

Title

Dear Weather Ghost

Files

Description

The poems in Dear Weather Ghost, Melissa Ginsburg’s debut collection, examine the idea of place from the viewpoint of exile, both actual—“in the green shadow of an old stand of forest”—and psychological—“a dune of the outside builds in me.” The poems’ speakers and their banishments are varied: a heron “great and blue and standing still,” a child who “used a spool for a racecar,” a mermaid yearning for “a rock on which to perch.” Unmoored, the speakers turn to objects as a means of connecting to place. One speaker observes villagers who “cut snowflakes out of paper / and taped them to the windows,” noting this “seemed like an attractive lifestyle.” Watching, remembering, wondering, these speakers want “danger in the form of deep feeling.” Built around a long epistolary sequence, “The Weather Ghost Letters,” this collection showcases Ginsburg’s exploratory poetic style. The language is straightforward yet unusual: “leaves pardon themselves” and “Tides flatten minnows.” The images are startling, sometimes unsettling: “A lightning throws the oak in flames, warms its chipmunks living inside.” The syntax runs the gamut from fragmented to inverted to traditional. The end result is a powerful, fresh collection, one that proclaims, “The world was full of this.”

ISBN

9781935536307

Publication Date

3-12-2013

Relational Format

book

Department

English

Publisher

Four Way Books

Disciplines

Poetry

Dear Weather Ghost
COinS