Ghost Man on Second
Winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Jarman
Ghost Man on Second
Winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Jarman
About the Book
Erica Reid’s debut collection, Ghost Man on Second, traces a daughter’s search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, “It’s hard to feel at home unless I’m aching.” Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid’s stories create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms—including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels—containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points. Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid’s active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there.
Praise for Ghost Man on Second
Ghost Man on Second gives us grief and endurance, loss and joy, transmuted by the play of verse and imagination into poetry. Its thematic concerns deal with an absent father, suggested by the book’s title, the troubles and determination of a young mother alone, and how these conditions have affected their child. Dilemmas, hurts, yearnings, and elusive retrievals are magically changed by the poet’s sophisticated technical skill into living poems, works of art that invite reading and rereading. New forms, like the duplex, and old, like the sonnet sequence, offer us strong feeling and fresh wisdom and the remembered sense that these have always been what we expect from well-wrought poems. As the poet implies in one of her best, what is behind and above the artificial ceiling are forgotten depths of space and light. And the aim of our imaginary self wandering the world is eventually to make it home.
—Mark Jarman, author of Zeno’s Eternity
Erica Reid grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and now lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she works in arts marketing. She earned her MFA at Western Colorado University and serves as assistant editor at THINK Journal. Her poetry has been nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize, won the Yellowwood Poetry Prize and […]
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