What Haunts Me

Praise for Bernadette Geyer

“The true ghost of What Haunts Me is a kind of pre-haunting, an elegy of anticipatory grief propelled as much by a poet’s urgency to ‘witness radiance as it happens’ as by a woman’s desire—as daughter, teacher, wife, mother—to document her family’s life and lineage. ‘It took years,’ she says, ‘to appreciate/ the preservation process,’ the ‘faint popping’ of jars like ‘airless metallic kisses.’ This collection sweeps across geography and time: from childhood in a small steel-plant town to adulthood traveling through Europe, all while reckoning with mortality. After a loss, we are tasked with sorting through the ‘tchotchke spirits’ left behind. But the idea of inheritance is here more often attuned to Geyer’s larger awareness of our human connectedness with the natural world. Like a red fox encountered herein, whose ‘gaze contained the history of the woods,’ the poems in What Haunts Me offer an unexpected solace, a talisman against the specter of forgetting.”
— Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Exploding Head

“What Haunts Me travels the map of personal history through a series of immersive, quietly stunning journeys. ‘We took the shortcut to our cousin’s/funeral, up the steep road to Port Vue,//’ recalls the poem, ‘Dead Men,’ ‘past houses staggered like thumbtacks/between the narrow lane and the hillside.’ Bernadette Geyer’s collection observes labor in all shapes and forms, and breaks through to understanding of how our loves, joys, and griefs must be understood as part of a larger moment in time and place. We do this to better prepare us for dialogue with our own children; we do this, metaphorically and literally, to better pass along our name. But this book’s weighty cloth of intent is worn lightly thanks to the poet’s dry humor and gift for the lyric stitch—’Remembering is quick and sharp as a stumble,/unexpected as a fly/or a flurry of moonlight.’ These poems are full of beautiful surprises.” 
— Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode: Poems

“Bernadette Geyer’s What Haunts Me is the apt title for a book where the past hallows the present tense. Times before jobs lost, between the good times and between economic hardships. These are poems of place and family, American as a backyard pond full of Koi. Reflections on Angkor Wat, the ruins of home, and a rundown steel town past its days. There is so much of human labor here: glassblowers and Ugandan beekeepers, of funerals and family dinners, and dig downs into ancestry on the level of names. This is a book of poems that will haunt you with the lives it narrates long after you have read the last page.”
— Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys