Your Father on the Train of Ghosts - by John Gallaher & G C Waldrep (Paperback)

About the Book

A year of epistolary writing culminating in one of the most extensive collaboration books in the history of American poetry.

Book Synopsis

A year of epistolary writing culminating in one of the most extensive collaboration books in the history of American poetry.

Review Quotes

"This is not a typical collaboration. It is not a book of exquisite corpse poems or turn-based Mad Libs. It is also not a G.C. Waldrep or a John Gallaher book; rather, a hybrid speaker emerges wearing Waldrep's hat and Gallaher's sneakers."
-- Sycamore Review

"This ample and sometimes witty collaboration between up-and-coming poet Waldrep and up-and-coming poet, critic, and blogger Gallaher could get attention for its unusual methods."
-- Publishers Weekly

"Your Father on the Train of Ghosts may be the first email renga, but it probably won't be the last. The co-authors inhabit 'a growing region, but there are others too, regions/ and examples of regions, ' together with 'rhubarb futures' and 'this child's chalk drawing on the sidewalk/of a sea monster on a Tilt-a-Whirl.' 'We are free/for a limited time, ' one of them writes (we don't know who wrote what), and that augurs a peculiarly American kind of happiness.
-- John Ashbery

"Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is an extensive, joint undertaking developed over the period of a year from an email correspondence between two of the finest younger American poets writing today...what is more interesting than charting their differences is seeing these two poets lose their individual voices as the boundaries between them fracture, widening into yet another distinct voice--a third voice, dissimilar from either of their own, which operates like the ghosts suggested by the title; a voice that is as profound as it is endearing, as familiar as it is confiding."
-- Diagram 12.2

About the Author

John Gallaher: John Gallaher is the author of the books of poetry, Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001), The Little Book of Guesses, winner of the Levis Poetry Prize from Four Way Books, and Map of the Folded World (The University of Akron Press), as well as the free online chapbook, Guidebook (Blue Hour Press). His poetry has been included in a volume of The Best American Poetry series, and has been chosen by Rae Armantrout for the Boston Review poetry contest. He is co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press, as well as, with Mary Biddinger, the Akron Series of Contemporary Poetics.

G.C. Waldrep: G.C. Waldrep is the author of three previous full-length collections of poems, Goldbeater's Skin (winner of the 2003 Colorado Prize), Disclamor (BOA, 2007) and Archicembalo (winner of the 2008 Dorset Prize), as well as three chapbooks, most recently "St. Laszlo Hotel" (Projective Industries, 2010). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, and Tin House, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. His work has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets, the Campbell Corner Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He has held fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and elsewhere. He was a 2007 Literature Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. Waldrep earned a Ph.D. in American history from Duke University and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. He also serves as Editor-at-Large for the Kenyon Review.