Country of Ghost

Gaylord Brewer’s ninth collection of poetry, Country of Ghost, is by turns harrowing, haunted, and darkly humorous, and always deeply felt. When the figure Ghost appears—crossing a bridge in Spain, beside a river of the dead in France, across a midnight lake in Finland—our speaker follows into a ravenous geography of longing and regret. In this astounding sequence of poems, who has summonsed whom? Brewer’s folie à deux explores both the worlds of the living and of the dead, worlds alternately aching and tender, and of the spirits caught between them.