Ghost, Like a Place - by Iain Haley Pollock (Paperback)

About the Book

Pollock's poetry draws from the violent history of America, showing how it inevitably influences young minds coming of age.

Book Synopsis

This collection highlights the complexities of fatherhood and how to raise young kids while bearing witness to the charged movements of social injustice and inequities of race in America. Memory, culpability, and our very humanness course through this book and strip us down to find joy and inspiration amid the darkness.

Review Quotes

". . . Pollock delivers moments of levity, lyric beauty, and a creeping melancholy that lend his work its distinct atmosphere." --Publishers Weekly "[Ghost, like a Place] delights frequently with eruptions of extraordinary tenderness, intimacy, and beauty. . . [A] gorgeous collection of complex poetry." --New York Journal of Books "Iain Pollock has a slow, steady hand that's fine tuning the pentatonic chambers where whole and half notes of the heart glisten the world. This Ghost, like a Place is a phantasm of small psalms settling into territory familiar with new beginnings and bearing ragged, but revealing truths." --Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry "Iain Pollock's eye is guided by passion--a passion for the city and street life, and the hard facts of individual lives amidst the violence and turmoil of American life today. But given this material, and contrary to what Derek Walcott once called the 'standard elegiac, ' his poems never moralize or forsake complexity of feeling. His ear for idiom is pitch perfect, and the forward drive of his syntax embodies an undeluded but fundamentally hopeful vision about remaking the world." --Tom Sleigh "The ghosts that haunt Iain Haley Pollock's poems have substance. Some have names: Tamir. Rex. Emmett. Black boys of Philadelphia. Their voices are 'the chattering of crows in a distant sycamore.' There is awe in these voices, and self-deprecation, and lament. Most--despite the fact that there is little comfort to offer here--there is a faith in the body, in humanity, to bear its burdens. Read Ghost, like a Place, and 'know, finally, the rapture and wildness of belief.'" --Meg Kearney, author of Home by Now

About the Author

Iain Haley Pollock's second collection of poems, Ghost, Like a Place, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in September 2018. His debut collection, Spit Back a Boy, won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He teaches English at Rye Country Day School in Rye, NY, and is a member of the poetry faculty at the Solstice MFA program of Pine Manor College.