Ghost Signs (Conversation Pieces)

A lantern hangs for the ghosts, both desolate and numinous. The white road and the black river run down into the dark and return again. In this collection of thirty-six poems and one story, Rhysling Award-winning poet Sonya Taaffe traces the complex paths between the dead, memory, and living. A two-part cycle written over the course of seven years, Ghost Signs leads the reader through the underworld of myth to the hauntings of the present, where the shades of Sappho, Alan Turing, and Ludwig Wittgenstein exist alongside Charon, Dido, and The War of the Worlds.

“The Boatman's Cure” follows a haunted woman and a dead man as they embark on a road trip through coastal New England, an exorcism at its end. Sharply imagined, deeply personal, Taaffe's work in Ghost Signs is at once an act of remembrance and release.

Reviews

“Sonya Taaffe's collection Ghost Signs...[is] not to be missed. Taaffe is probably my favorite poet in the genre, and the book collects a great many of her recent poems, but also includes one wonderful long story, 'The Boatman's Cure.' The prose is particularly wonderful—full of striking metaphor, with a driving, nearly desperate rhythm, and the story is original and powerful, about a woman who can see and perhaps free ghosts. She seeks out an apparently quite ancient ghost, for obscure reasons that are slowly revealed to lie in her difficult past, especially her relationship with her dead sister—and of course her sister's ghost.” —Locus, Rich Horton

“The poetry here has the brilliance of a knife's edge, sharp and cuttingly clean, saturated with meaning and freighted with significance. And fittingly, given the title, every poem is a ghost. Every poem a katabatic descent to the underworld, a shade glimpsed at the corner of the eye, the whisper of something lost as it teases the edge of memory. If there is one word to describe this collection, it is elegiac [...] By any standards, this is an incredibly successful poetry collection.” —Strange Horizons, Liz Bourke

Ghost Signs is a masterpiece: In content, in curation, these poems and one story are that species of perfect that has me struggling with metaphor. I can hardly bear to speak of it: All I want is to sit you, dear reader, down in a comfortable place with a beverage to hand and make you listen to each one, pausing periodically to say “can you even believe this line” or “RIGHT?” as you exclaim, inevitably, over the feelings these words provoke.

Amal El Mohtar, Lightspeed Magazine