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The Seventh Town of Ghosts

Poems

Author Faith Arkorful

Paperback

$18.50 US

McClelland & Stewart

5.51"W x 8.48"H x 0.32"D | 5 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Mar 26, 2024 | 104 Pages | 9780771004452

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CBC Poetry Prize finalist and National Magazine Award honoree Faith Arkorful’s breathtaking, surpassingly thoughtful debut collection of poems.

Hauntings form the canopy of The Seventh Town of Ghosts. These titular towns, centred in yesterdays, tomorrows, and the ongoing, lead to a special kind of singing: songs to the reader who wrestles with existence, the unsure peace within family, and the often-tense interdependence of life.

Here, discernment is ever-present, guided by Faith Arkorful’s insights on not only the ravages of the state and the police upon the Black family and life at large, but also on a kaleidoscope of connections—sisterhood, daughterhood, kinship, solitude, death, romance—and how tenderness, chosen and repeated, can shield against life’s blows.

These towns also enchant, shape-lifting through humour, irony, and the small refractions of language where Arkorful guides us through the fault lines and the undertow, in the form of fruit, island volcanoes, Formula 1, and the expansive hum of life.

This poet-as-sojourner bears careful, caring witness, her attention reserved not only for her living and her dead but hyphenated two-fold by the fragile things and the lasting things. These poems remind us of what contours our mysterious and fleeting presence on Earth.

Praise for The Seventh Town of Ghosts and Faith Arkorful

“Faith Arkorful’s poems are full of living. Despite, because of, on the edge of, in and through the body, history, grief and tenderness, The Seventh Town of Ghosts is heartfelt music here. And magic.” —Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

“The Seventh Town of Ghosts invites us into an intimacy of collisions, siblings, stars, saltwater, citrus fruit, and blood, as well as the threat of enforcement, erasure, and all ‘the prerequisites of violence.’ Arkorful’s voice is lucent and uncompromising as she charts and queries both her relations and selfhood in poems that are at once as fulsome as ‘a blanket of stars [and] delicate as a spider’s web.’ This is a work I will return to for both its interrogation and celebration of the beauty and necessity of haunting.” —Liz Howard, author of Letters in a Bruised Cosmos

“Insistently lyrical (‘I AM NOBODY ELSE BUT MY OWN BECOMING’), The Seventh Town of Ghosts sings flesh and hauntings, asphalt and saltwater, earthworms and mathematics—sings the urgency, amidst enveloping noise, of bravest existential clarity: ‘I have no answers, only small honesties.’ Faith Arkorful is the poet we need, with fierce new philosophies, and a tongue for ‘both the acid and sweetness.’” —David Chariandy, author of Brother

Faith Arkorful’s work has appeared in GUTS Magazine, Peach Magazine, PRISM International, Hobart Pulp, and Canthius Magazine, among other places. In 2022 she was a semi-finalist in the 92NY’s Discovery Poetry Contest. She received an honourable mention at the 2020 National Magazine Awards and in 2019 was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Faith was born in Toronto, where she still resides. View titles by Faith Arkorful

FAMILY AFFAIR

they say we are a family good at extending / i make a decision to hold
a seminar on how to live / i schedule this party for my uncles on the first

day of spring / my dead uncles play hooky with the afterlife
slipping out of their graves while the ground unthaws / the earth still soft

i could never play hooky myself / all my childhood my mother kept her
hand wrapped around my wrist / a lightweight shackle held me

down all nights / a weight my mother gifted me for my own sake
the taste of iron swirling in the mouth always / no shard of a
coconut to scoop out the pulp of the night.

my dead uncles arrive to the seminar an hour late / they hover above
the chairs in my backyard / my living uncles arrive after the dead ones
and the reunion is a big family affair / my uncles orbit around one another

and me / with haste / all the seminar pamphlets are
out of my hands / papers with titles: / interactions with cops
explaining health complications to your doctor / drinks with bitters

my uncles hand me back this polite literature / they insist upon
an idea that in the afterlife / there is no time for posturing over

anything other than perhaps a garden / someone you love deeply
the truth of it they insist / is that most of living you never really learn

the police come through / as they always do / breaking the warmth
of the reunion / my uncles sit together around a table playing dominoes

the police lean over and ask to play / the police lean over to claim
that someone has called about the noise / the police are leaning over

What noise, I ask. Half of the people here are dead. / my dead uncles
do not speak in the presence of force / is that not what you wanted
this is the living of not knowing and wanting more / survival at

the cost of pride / now that the police have arrived the party
must end / my dead uncles / must return to the earth
before night / when the ground hardens / and although the party

starts late / it ends late / if not as late as we wanted / but still
i feel so loved / i hold all my uncles together / they hold me
in the spring we get used to the sun / staying for long

my favourite void is from the valley of lateness / i love lateness
i love it like i love my uncles / my late uncles / my late late uncles

alive and dead / oh, how i love / the suggestion that the earth
can extend / that there will always be room for more.