Greater Ghost [Paperback]

In Christian Collier’s debut poetry collection,Greater Ghost, this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member, and the specter of police brutality. With a profound awareness of literary tradition, Collier enters into the American canon and dialogues with Black Southern noir—a poem like “Beloved,” whose title expresses not only a genuine tenderness in its term of endearment but invokes Morrison, contextualizes this book within the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S., presenting again the prolific losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time, and yet remembers the resilience of love and transformative possibility of self-actualization from inside tragedy. 
 Christian Collier's evocative poetry collection,Greater Ghost, invites readers on a journey that touches upon themes of faith, hope, and the search for meaning. In "Sauna," he describes breath as a temporary beast, “a frightened deer   sometimes sprinting / away &    out of view" to underscore the transient nature of life and our constant quest for sustenance and survival. With poignant and vivid imagery, Collier captures fleeting moments of happiness and shadows that often lurk behind them. He writes, "Loss is the language living pours between our teeth. / In a way, we are what sits between two broken bones." This body as a vessel underscores the tension between the internal self and external forces. Don’t wait. Dive into a world where every poem is a discovery. Christian Collier's poems are tender and haunting.
—Ruben Quesada
 If “the wound remains an open border,” as Christian J. Collier tells us inGreater Ghost, so, too, dló+