All My Ghosts Are Here by John Smith

“John Smith is a cartologist of the world, collecting both birds and ghosts, of what both the body knows and what it has forgotten. All the ghosts are here. The workers at the IGA, the pandemic dead, the strata of the earth, casinos and cicadas, there is labor and minimum wage, a child’s shifting gender, a grandson born, love letters to his wife.  At one point he writes, “Everything has an afterlife/as long as someone/remembers it.”  Which is why I love these poems, where what is gone never fully leaves, carried in the heart’s ventricles, and what is lived is turned into a kind of singing, human, bird-like, almost anti-elegiac, defiant, all of it singing.  Blue Herons, grackles, clowns and Kabir. Ornette Coleman, and our holy dead.  He must write it down.  These gifts from the vessel.  All of it.  All of it.  All of it.”

–Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of Sorrow

“John Smith’s poems fully comprehend the principal irony of the local: it is ubiquitous. In All My Ghosts Are Here the poet intimately shares with us his New Jersey, his Garden State, his archetypal nowhere. And he fully enters the local landscape by way of elegy, which, as we know, is not just a commemoration of the dead but a celebration of what’s alive, haunted and haunting — beloved.”

—Patrick Rosal, author of The Last thing: New and Selected Poems