Ghost County

In John McCarthy’s debut collection, lifetimes are spent traveling in pickup trucks across the Midwest, exploring spaces between love and its imperfect manifestations. Ghost County drives blue-collar back roads and guides readers through personal meditations about heritage, loss, and the desire to reimagine the past and future. Dateless baseball trophies, the world’s largest catsup bottle, and swivel set televisions illustrate a Midwest that is recognizable and echoes with its own poetry, affirming the traditions and experiences that bind this region to self and self to region. “In John McCarthy’s arresting debut, the middle of America reveals itself to be a belly full of opportunities and frustrations.” —Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke “The poems in Ghost County marvelously articulate the strange, fluctuating space between the real and the imagined…Impassioned and insightful, this is a book that travels between those very real places not found on any map: memory, disappointment, and hope.” —Charlotte Pence, author of Many Small Fires and The Branches, the Axe, the Missing