The Seventh Town of Ghosts

Praise for The Seventh Town of Ghosts and Faith Arkorful Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Finalist Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Longlist Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Longlist “Faith Arkorful’s poems are full of living. Despite, because of, on the edge of, in and through the body, history, grief and tenderness, The Seventh Town of Ghosts is heartfelt music here. And magic.” —Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes “The Seventh Town of Ghosts invites us into an intimacy of collisions, siblings, stars, saltwater, citrus fruit, and blood, as well as the threat of enforcement, erasure, and all ‘the prerequisites of violence.’ Arkorful’s voice is lucent and uncompromising as she charts and queries both her relations and selfhood in poems that are at once as fulsome as ‘a blanket of stars [and] delicate as a spider’s web.’ This is a work I will return to for both its interrogation and celebration of the beauty and necessity of haunting.” —Liz Howard, author of Letters in a Bruised Cosmos “Insistently lyrical (‘I AM NOBODY ELSE BUT MY OWN BECOMING’), The Seventh Town of Ghosts sings flesh and hauntings, asphalt and saltwater, earthworms and mathematics—sings the urgency, amidst enveloping noise, of bravest existential clarity: ‘I have no answers, only small honesties.’ Faith Arkorful is the poet we need, with fierce new philosophies, and a tongue for ‘both the acid and sweetness.’” —David Chariandy, author of Brother