Book Review

Erica Reid’s “Ghost Man,” an imaginary man who held the speaker’s place on bases during wiffle ball games with her father, continues to run “toward & away / from home, toward & away from home.” So, too, does Ghost Man on Second, Reid’s brilliant debut poetry collection which plays skillfully with themes of grief, home, and family. Winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, Reid’s collection engages a wide variety of poetic forms and probes emotional depths, adeptly navigating not only the grief and loss inherent to a challenging childhood, but the conviction, strength, and beauty that result.

Like the bases on the wiffle ball field, Reid’s collection of forty poems is organized into four parts: “First,” “Second,” “Third,” and “Home.” These sections are necessarily preceded by the titular framing proem, “Ghost Man on Second,” which sets up the metaphor of an imaginary stand-in self, running to and from home. “First” includes fifteen poems that patch together the experience of the speaker’s childhood: chaos, absence, longing, self-loathing, parentification. Several poems in this section are written in form—multiple sestinas, a duplex, two Golden Shovels, and several in neat tercets and quatrains—as if to impose order on the disordered. In the heartbreaking “Why Is My Angel So Small?” the speaker wishes her pocket-sized guardian could provide the care she is not getting:

To tell you the truth, I had hoped to be held.

I wished to be swaddled & not to be needed,

to have the chance to be the child this time around.

Yet here I am again, in a too-familiar land,

where the one meant to take care of me is eating from my hand.

Composing the entirety of the second part of the collection, the sonnet sequence “Emily” explores the speaker’s relationship with her “mercurial” young mother and the impact of her mother’s mistreatment of her into adulthood. At times calling in Persephone and Demeter and at times reading more narratively, there is a deep thread of longing throughout these sonnets, as when the speaker states, “it’s hard for me to feel at home unless I’m aching” and “always her daughter, part of me / keeps reaching through the hurt to find her hand.” In the final sonnet in the sequence, a direct address to the speaker’s mother, we find out who Emily is—a name initially given to the speaker before her teenage mother changed her mind. “Emily, a name / I think of as half mine, the way I think / of you most days,” she says, exposing her ambiguous attachment to her mother. In a way, Emily is a “ghost man” in this second part; the ghost of someone who might “have been a better daughter?”

In “Third,” Reid explores these themes via striking natural imagery. “Deciduous,” a sestina that has stayed with me, employs a conversational tone and a controlled form, characteristic of this collection, and draws stunning parallels between teeth, trees, and family:

Last night I learned that human baby teeth

are also called deciduous, like trees

that lose their leaves. That which falls

or that which sheds. In Latin, the word

was also used to describe shooting stars

& testicles. Words have roots. Teeth do too.

Reid uses the sestina form to braid notions of language, inheritance, origin, and falling (literal and metaphorical) into a tapestry of illuminating and uncomfortable connections, mirroring the complexity of the natural world and family. As the speaker admits, in a direct address to her mother at the end of the third sestet, “Yes, we look alike, down to our scars.”

In the final section, “Home,” the reader arrives with the speaker to a place that feels empowered, even welcoming. These final twelve poems, which continue to show off Reid’s talent writing in diverse poetic forms (such as the ghazal, sonnet, terza rima, and prose poem), reveal a more mature, self-aware speaker. In one of the most arresting poems of the collection “The Artificial Ceiling,” Reid uses the luminous metaphor of a 1970s “drop tile ceiling” covering fourteen feet of a historic ballroom ceiling to represent and reflect on “my decisions, my past, the choices // that once protected me. I made them all with love, I hung each mistake / with care. Over time, I too forgot about the light no longer there.”

“The Getaway Car,” one of the collection’s final poems, directly addresses the speaker’s niece with sass, confidence, and care:

When you collude with the moon & decide it is time to ask

a question, any question, my answer will be yes. Need help

conquering your very first unconquerable mistake? Yes,

I’ve untied my share of knots. Watch my hands. Are you ready

to make a little mischief, something to make your diary

worth hiding? I’ve got ideas. (It is not safe to discuss them here.)

The tone, levity, and energy contrast with that of the neglected speaker from the start of the book, displaying the speaker’s deep care for the next generation and creating hope for stopping the cycle of generational trauma that winds its way throughout these poems.

Ghost Man on Second is an ambitious and finely-wrought first collection that exhibits Erica Reid’s prowess in poetic form and figuration as well as deeply incisive observations on the nature of family and what and where home can be. Reid takes the reader on a satisfying journey through difficult, language-rich terrain to show that home is a place we leave and arrive to over and over, like the Ghost Man: invisibly and with purpose, grief, and triumph.