New Ghosts
by Laura Quinney
These poems live and move among images: beach, forest, fire, dark — and then among the images of images: hunger, shadow, regret. What is it to be an image, or to become an image, or to stay an image? Inward and intense, the poems together comprise an extended meditation on temporality: time’s effect on the sense of self, and the self’s effect on the sense of time.
as the skipping stone
breaks one image
and skims onward
to the next until
the stone sinks
so when I was a girl
I survived by moving
and now
thanks to dreams I live
even by standing still.
–from "Tree Pose"
Laura Quinney teaches literature at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. She has written on Blake, Shelley, Ashbery and Kierkegaard, among others. This is her second volume of poems to be published by Borderland Books. She brought out her first, Corridor (2008), under the pseudonym Josephine Singer.
68 pp. 5 x 8 inches
$15. Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-9965052-5-3
2016