A debut poetry collection centered on strained family relationships and the search for new homes.
Erica Reid's debut collection, Ghost Man on Second, traces a daughter's search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, ""It's hard to feel at home unless I'm aching."" Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid's poems create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms—including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels—containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points. Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid's active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there.
Ghost Man on Second is the winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Jarman.
By:
Erica Reid
Imprint: Autumn House Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 10mm
Weight: 172g
ISBN: 9781637680810
ISBN 10: 1637680813
Pages: 88
Publication Date: 29 March 2024
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: No Longer Our Product
Disorder Five-Story House After Rain Sestina Obbligato Invitation Duplex for the Noonday Demon Shake a man, when you can, by his ribs. Pelt Why Is My Angel So Small? The Letter My Father Never Wrote Me Turns Up in a Bag of Lost Mail from 1861 Links Daguerreo Father as Ghost or Sheep or Nothing Wake-Up Call The Earth Has Hiked Her Skirt Shucking Emily Colorado Cottonwoods portent The National Register of Champion Trees When I Say I Am Not a Morning Person Deciduous Nivôse Preface Owl Hermitage Spinnaker The Pivot of the River Duck North Shields Ponds If Ever There Were a Time for a Long Title This Would Be It My Womb as a Room on Airbnb O For a Muse On Fire Baubo Smash Room The Drive-In Movie Strings The Artificial Ceiling My Grandmother Cannot Understand Why I Would Want to Hear Her Birth Story The Getaway Car Part of Me Hurtling Toward Ghazal Flying Solo
Erica Reid grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and now lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she works in arts marketing. She earned her MFA at Western Colorado University and serves as assistant editor at THINK Journal. Her poetry won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, the Yellowwood Poetry Prize, and the Helen Schaible Sonnet Contest (Modern Sonnets category), and was commissioned by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. Erica's poems appear or are forthcoming in Rattle, Birmingham Poetry Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Broadsided Press, The Lyric, Yalobusha Review, and more.
Reviews for Ghost Man on Second
“Ghost Man on Second gives us grief and endurance, loss and joy, transmuted by the play of verse and imagination into poetry. Its thematic concerns deal with an absent father, suggested by the book’s title, the troubles and determination of a young mother alone, and how these conditions have affected their child. Dilemmas, hurts, yearnings, and elusive retrievals are magically changed by the poet’s sophisticated technical skill into living poems, works of art that invite reading and rereading. New forms, like the duplex, and old, like the sonnet sequence, offer us strong feeling and fresh wisdom and the remembered sense that these have always been what we expect from well-wrought poems. As the poet implies in one of her best, what is behind and above the artificial ceiling are forgotten depths of space and light. And the aim of our imaginary self wandering the world is eventually to make it home.” -- Mark Jarman, judge for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize
