Ghost in the Graveyard

Ghost in the Graveyard is an archive of vanishings—the towns across the country that have emptied and become myths of place that arrive and vanish like snow. Nicholl knows how to craft the architecture of spaces that have been abandoned but points to the absences with longitude and latitude and story. The poems resurrect the forgotten places, nail up borders around the ruins so they can be a house worth haunting. History may indeed be doomed to repeat itself, but it always re-homes its ghosts, carrying the past into every stanza, filling each relocated grave with moonlight.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal

Sometimes it is the job of a poet to invent a history to create an unknowable history, and that is precisely what Greg Nicholl has done. In this striking debut, Nicholl evokes a whole poetic world that describes abandonment and lost dreams with tremendous skill, sensitivity and dramatic flair. Nicholl gives his readers the beauty of invention alongside the ruin of time.

—Mark Wunderlich, author of MATEY

By remembering them, Greg Nicholl, honors the forgotten places and people of working-class American towns in his brilliant collection of poems, Ghost in the Graveyard. These poems are the stories behind the pictures in that box of old photographs you discovered at the thrift store.

—Kim Richey, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter

In Ghost in the Graveyard, Greg Nicholl writes: “Out west, the landscape / is rampant with ghosts…” This is a book of an American afterlife, a map of towns that refuse to vanish with histories that won’t stay buried where girls are “hoping / for gold, / not a skull.” Nicholl writes like a cinematographer, turning ruin into an intimate scene of something beautiful. Throughout this stunning collection, he shows us our humanness written through place. Nicholl shines a flashlight into forgotten corners; these poems just don’t haunt—they witness.

—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Accidental Devotions

A flare of light, bleached faces in a photograph, a town dissolving into memory—so begins Greg Nicholl’s Ghost in the Graveyard, a restless and remarkable debut collection that crisscrosses the country surveying our abandoned places. “To become a ghost town requires decay / and ghosts,” Nicholl writes, and the landscapes he chronicles are haunted by the decay of industry and the ghosts of people who persisted, for a while, in the aftermath, scraping together a life though “the fields here / are dry, the oil wells capped.” If you listen carefully, you can hear the wind whistling through the abandoned towns yet to come, places made uninhabitable by our accelerating climate crisis: forest fires, dried-up reservoirs, catastrophic floods. Nicholl’s poems are “the voice calling [us] from the other side / of the door.”

—Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer