Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-1-990293-62-7
$21.95 CDN / $20.95 US | Trade Paperback
February 2024
How do we redefine the self when memory begins to deteriorate?
This question is at the heart of Ghost Work, a suite of poems that explores a son’s gradual loss of his father from dementia. In compassionate, well-crafted pantoums, triolets, ghazals, and sonnets, Rob Colman probes family connection, digging into the liminal space memory preserves between our natural and built environments. Ghost Work is at once a tribute to a lost family member, and a testament to the fragility of the human condition.
Praise for Ghost Work
Rob Colman’s Ghost Work is a slow dance with memory. A slow dance with memory as it crumbles, flees. A slow dance with pieces, and the heart begging one more chorus, one more verse, one more line, and the dance floor is a rising pool, and the pool is time.—Katie Fewster-Yan, author of Surrender & Resistance
‘Catastrophe’ has less to do with the stars (astro) than with a downwards turn in fortune (kata = down, strophe = turn). Robert Colman’s book of elegies for his father, each of which is a kind of star, is about a downturn in a life and the consequences the living face. With a quiet and gentle elegance, Colman’s poems are haunted by memories of deterioration and aging in a loved one. Faced with mortality, these poems insist on living.—Evan Jones, author of Later Emperors
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