If You Have Ghosts

Poetry. "Graceful, tensile, and electric, IF YOU HAVE GHOSTS is a haunting and haunted book. John Pursley III's prodigious gifts for metaphor, imagery, and an elliptical narrative reminiscent of Larry Levis are amply displayed in this guide through liquid time. We encounter a fire that 'sounded like my mother snapping sheets / Onto the bed as they came out of the dryer,' Chet Baker's 'androgynous melody' that is 'like the false-front store / that never closes, & fools no one,' a lollipop dropped by a child in an airport that explodes 'in a confusion of ruby shards.' Empathetically felt, played out in a deeply nuanced syntax, these poems both reveal and complicate our troubled, troubling world"--Beth Ann Fennelly.