Ghostlit: Poems (Paperback or Softback)

Intimate, urgent, and relentlessly inventive, the poems in Ghostlit reflect upon mythology and feminist pop culture and contemporary ideology as they may become embedded in the psyches and even the bodies of their inheritors. Through visceral and sometimes gothic-inspired images, mythological allusions, and the assemblage of strands of narrative, the poems in this collection chart the ways in which manipulative emotional strategies on individual and cultural levels inflict lingering harm upon minds and bodies. Throughout, the poems peel back the layers of what it means for an abuse survivor to reclaim a sense of self—long after the damage has been done. “It turns out that the years I believed myself lucky/were partly responsible for my thinking/there was something deeply wrong with me” could be understood as a refrain for the speaker in Ghostlit or as a shorthand for a cautionary tale about how many survivors may be encouraged to deny the reality of abuse.

THEODORA ZIOLKOWSKI is the author of the novella, On the Rocks, winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Prairie Schooner, no tokens, Oxford Poetry (UK), and Short Fiction (England), among others. She teaches creative writing as an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.