Ghost Sentence

2017
Atmosphere Press

ISBN: 9781640084674

About the Book

Ghost Sentence is the first collection published by Mary Flanagan. The book traverses the political sea change of the 2016 election and 2017 inauguration. The text moves from the personal to the political across the volume, from scrambled texts taken from political websites, to historical recreations of dictatorships; from love letters that accompany the excess surreality of consumerism, to unexpected language that breeds rebellion of the heart during an anthropocenic era of human debris and rising tides…

Critical Praise

“Incendiary, dizzying, deadpan, Ghost Sentence is a love letter, an ultimatum, a wildly poetic survival guide to the death throes of the patriarchy, our age of bogus authority, white noise, and disembodied menace. Flanagan’s charged lines shimmer between desire and disaster: “everyone knows it’s not safe to/go out on a brimstone night/ especially with you”; “leaves still cling to the trees but/the sun is telling them to drop dead.” This book coins a new language for a world that blazes all around us. Ghost Sentence is brilliant, contemporary to the millisecond.”
– D. NURKSE, author of eleven books of poetry including Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult (2017), A Night in Brooklyn (2012), The Border Kingdom (2008), and Burnt Island (2006). His recent prizes include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written on human rights and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Purchase

You can find my books at your local book store, Bookshop.com or Amazon.