Dear Ghosts,

 

Don’t sharpen them.
Expectation, more dangerous
than any blade.
—“Knives in the Borrowed House”

Fourteen years after Moon Crossing Bridge—Tess Gallagher’s powerful elegies for her husband, Raymond Carver—Dear Ghosts, is the return of Gallagher’s unequivocal voice. In these new poems, the ghosts of the past are conjured as part of the 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 love and friendship in these spare lyrics and muscular narratives, each punctuated by her resilience and grace. Here is the new work by one of America’s most accomplished poets.