The Identification of Ghosts

Poetry. Women's Studies. "Maryrose Larkin's surprising and rangy poem is part exorcism, part tour of the ruthless canals of the body where memories like ghosts hover, retreat, get startled and go astray. Decay and loss are present, but as movement, animation. Even the process of revision is palpably felt, not as groping for excellence but as openness to re-vision. Where some poets simply evoke contingency, Maryrose enacts it, and with a powerful sense of compassion. The ghosts here...
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Poetry. Women's Studies. "Maryrose Larkin's surprising and rangy poem is part exorcism, part tour of the ruthless canals of the body where memories like ghosts hover, retreat, get startled and go astray. Decay and loss are present, but as movement, animation. Even the process of revision is palpably felt, not as groping for excellence but as openness to re-vision. Where some poets simply evoke contingency, Maryrose enacts it, and with a powerful sense of compassion. The ghosts here lead not to an underworld or to what may come, but to 'touch and hazard.' The effect is both haunting and inviting. Go in and meet everything outside, anew."—Standard Schaefer

"Maryrose Larkin's THE IDENTIFICATION OF GHOSTS is a haunting jaunt through the lumen of 'I' & 'empire' - questionable, if not faulty, words offering both a skeletal structure to an i as well as a system of illness & absence to all. Larkin attends to identity & language -'this perception ... called a malfunction'- with exquisite tenderness & musical tension - achieving a state of homeostasis if only through the fact that '... no one / how could one ever one / is more likely never to.' THE IDENTIFICATION OF GHOSTS tells us how we 'can be immortal & / human at once.' It is a riveting, gorgeous work."—kathryn pringle