Phantoms by Joanna Grisham

In Phantoms, Joanna Grisham’s debut poetry collection, the world is both Holy Ghost and star-shaped mouth. It is a woman reaching into the nothing-space below her thigh as she remembers a lost limb. It is a voiceless girl in a 1910 Georgia sanitarium who recalls a lost child. It is the poet writing a past she can almost taste, like chocolate and ash. Time, Grisham writes, is a lie we use to shape our own selves into something we can bear. The poems in Phantoms do far more than teach us to bear the world—they remind us that we are not alone.

–Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Wanting Radiance (The University Press of Kentucky, 2021)

From phantom limbs to cars named Ghost, Grisham swings open the doors to the past and finds the skeletons smoking Vantages, speaking in tongues, and spidering girls on the swings. She shares their stories like cups of coffee extending a conversation that will last until the shadows of “women who could not / be tamed or comprehended” turn into clouds and coax buttercups from the fields. Whether you anticipate the need or not, these intimacies balm.

–Amy Wright, author of Paper Concert (Sarabande Books, 2021)

Three poems set in one of Georgia’s sanitariums frame the haunting stories in Joanna Grisham’s poetry collection Phantoms. This powerful book explores how we can be held captive by the memories of our pasts, by trauma and by longing. Here the phantoms are what we struggle to let go of and what will not let go of us.

–Blas Falconer, author of Forgive the Body This Failure (Four Way Books, 2018)