Your Father on the Train of Ghosts
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- £7.49
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third "voice" emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own.
The poems of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts read as lyric snapshots of a culture we are all too familiar with, even as it slips from us: malls and supermarkets, museums and parades, toxic waste and cheesecakes, ghosts and fire, fathers and sons. Ultimately, these fables and confessions constitute a sort of gentle apocalypse, a user-friendly self-help manual for the end of time.
G.C. Waldrep is author of Goldbeater's Skin (2003 Colorado Prize for poetry), Disclamor, and Archicembalo (2008 Dorset Prize). He has won awards from the Poetry Society of America and Academy of American Poets, fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony; and an NEA fellowship. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at Bucknell University.
John Gallaher is author of Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls, The Little Book of Guesses (Levis Poetry Prize), and Map of the Folded World. His poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry series and numerous journals and anthologies. He co-edits The Laurel Review, GreenTower Press, and the Akron Series of Contemporary Poetics. He teaches at Northwest Missouri State University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ample and sometimes witty collaboration between up-and-coming poet Waldrep (Archicembalo) and up-and-coming poet, critic and blogger Gallaher (Map of the Folded World) could get attention for its unusual methods: over a year of incessant e-mails, the pair came up jointly with each of 200+ poems, some of whose titles would stand out in any collection: "The Radio Inside Your Health Plan Is Sleeping," "The Sahara as Anecdote," "Ethel and Myrtle Try to Avoid How Emotional They Get." But if the titles convey novelty and excitement, the world-weary, slippery poems may not: Gallaher and Waldrep keep returning to figures of sad confusion: "All the fathers/ of Indiana, for reasons unknown,/ are falling... The fathers of Indiana/ are so modern/ they haven't happened yet." With their estranged speakers, fluid situations, and shifting pronouns, many pages come very close to the postmodern comic techniques of John Ashbery in the 1970s, or to James Tate's more recent books. "It makes it just like playing a game," one poem says, "pretending/ these new ideas are old ones/ or perhaps the old ones are new, depending/ on our current relationship/ to this clutter no one can remember accruing." Many of these poems rise above pastiche to shine in their own evening light.
