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Ghost Signs is forthcoming from Aqueduct Press.
This is my first collection since 2011: thirty-six ghost poems and one novelette. The oldest dates from the winter of 2006, the newest from the night before my wedding in 2013. These are incredibly important poems to me; they encompass many of my historical and mythological touchstones and, taken all together, they chart one of the ways in which I began to think of myself as alive after a very long period of conviction that I was dead in all the ways that mattered. The novelette, by the time I finished it, was my first full-length story in five years. It came out of a dream and built itself around fragments of things I had loved and lost and discovered and hung on to; it became another form of katabasis, although it is also the most traditional haunted house story I have ever written. They speak in the same key.
The cover image is adapted from a photo taken by Rob Noyes. It is a ghost sign we have both walked by. It says the most important thing.
This year, 2014, has been an extraordinarily hard year. It was not supposed to be. It was not what I expected. It has been hard fought for and often felt like drowning; I do not know if some things will ever mend and I know I will have to learn to live with others. This cycle, formally completed almost a year ago today, is a kind of revenant itself, from a past when I didn't know what was coming. Ghost signs are a palimpsest, enduring through brick and weather to say something of the past, however fractured or commercial. We invest stories in them. Memories are palimpsests, too, and sometimes all a parchment or a papyrus says is: I was here. I am. Sometimes that is all that matters.
I am not dead and I will not be. I have these poems to prove it.
Sonya Taaffe writes hauntingly of edgelands. Her poetic world lies on both banks of the Acheron, which may be crossed both ways. In Ghost Signs, she writes of uncompleted lives, of the lingering and commingling of the dead with us, the living. Where we meet are borderlands, uncertain spaces: in a saltmarsh, in the mud of trenches, in the realm of numbers, on the edge of sleep. There is darkness; but the journey is upward, into light. A transcendent book. —Greer Gilman, author of Cloud & Ashes
This is my first collection since 2011: thirty-six ghost poems and one novelette. The oldest dates from the winter of 2006, the newest from the night before my wedding in 2013. These are incredibly important poems to me; they encompass many of my historical and mythological touchstones and, taken all together, they chart one of the ways in which I began to think of myself as alive after a very long period of conviction that I was dead in all the ways that mattered. The novelette, by the time I finished it, was my first full-length story in five years. It came out of a dream and built itself around fragments of things I had loved and lost and discovered and hung on to; it became another form of katabasis, although it is also the most traditional haunted house story I have ever written. They speak in the same key.
The cover image is adapted from a photo taken by Rob Noyes. It is a ghost sign we have both walked by. It says the most important thing.
This year, 2014, has been an extraordinarily hard year. It was not supposed to be. It was not what I expected. It has been hard fought for and often felt like drowning; I do not know if some things will ever mend and I know I will have to learn to live with others. This cycle, formally completed almost a year ago today, is a kind of revenant itself, from a past when I didn't know what was coming. Ghost signs are a palimpsest, enduring through brick and weather to say something of the past, however fractured or commercial. We invest stories in them. Memories are palimpsests, too, and sometimes all a parchment or a papyrus says is: I was here. I am. Sometimes that is all that matters.
I am not dead and I will not be. I have these poems to prove it.
Sonya Taaffe writes hauntingly of edgelands. Her poetic world lies on both banks of the Acheron, which may be crossed both ways. In Ghost Signs, she writes of uncompleted lives, of the lingering and commingling of the dead with us, the living. Where we meet are borderlands, uncertain spaces: in a saltmarsh, in the mud of trenches, in the realm of numbers, on the edge of sleep. There is darkness; but the journey is upward, into light. A transcendent book. —Greer Gilman, author of Cloud & Ashes
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I'm so sorry to hear that! Perhaps it will cough it up again someday. We will definitely have to do something.
Thank you!