Scratching the Ghost: Poems - Softcover

Booth, Dexter L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555976603 ISBN 13: 9781555976606

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2013

Synopsis

Winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Major Jackson

The stub of your left leg dangles
as I hold you up, my hands inserted under your arms
like a child. You are complaining about the itch,
the burn; scratch the ghost of your calf and heel.
―from "Scratching the Ghost"

Dexter L. Booth's ruminations on loss in this award-winning debut are rooted in a time past but one still palpable and persistent. Here are memories of love lost, family mourned, a father absent, ghosts of hometowns and childhood. Here too is a "Short Letter to the Twentieth Century" and, finally, a "Long Letter to the Twentieth Century," as if across this collection the poet is mustering up the force to speak back to history.

"In Dexter Booth's Scratching the Ghost, a cracked egg means the universe is splitting, the slap of a double-dutch rope is a broken-throated hymn, and splitting a squealing hog is akin to lovemaking. These are poems loyal to their own intrepid logic and reckless plausibility. Yet, lest the reader get too giddy in a fun house of mirrors, here, too, are the melodic laments and remarkable lyric passages of a poet who acknowledges the infinite current of melancholy that underlines his journey." ―Major Jackson

About this title

About the Author

Dexter L. Booth earned an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University. His poems have appeared in Amendment, Grist, New Delta Review, and Willow Springs. He lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Reviews

Chosen by Major Jackson for the 2012 Cave Canem Prize, Booth’s first collection exhibits stylistic versatility and thematic range seldom found in first books. Booth juxtaposes prose poems that work like short stories and compact poetic fragments he calls abstracts and reminiscence on childhood in the twentieth century. From a violent stepfather who stalks the pages of the past to an adolescent sister who dances in the church aisles, legacies of family and religion haunt the book. Booth figures the metaphysical in plain language (“There was dinner: / white bread and someone’s blood”), and he conjures strange, erotic physicality (“Mouths foaming / like a scar after / the sweet kiss / of peroxide”). Whether considering a skin-lightener, popular in Kenya, called Queen Elizabeth or the “human guts” of Barney the purple dinosaur, Booth illuminates the odd lives of objects. This promising young poet joins fellow newcomers Austin Smith, Saeed Jones, and Jose Perez Beduya in a new class of writers who interrogate history through intense imagery while questioning the conventions of identity. --Diego Báez

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555976603
• ISBN 13: 9781555976606
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88