Dear Ghosts,

You can do nothing better for yourself than to read Dear Ghosts,. Tess Gallagher has always been among the best of American poets. Her most recent work continues to add jewels to the crown of great poetry. As the poems engage us, we become aware why poetry is so necessary to the human spirit. Dear Ghosts, opens us to emotion. Within its enacted drama, we walk the difficult but necessary terrain of reaching out to others, thereby realizing ourselves. Finally, Gallagher explores the frontier of language itself, continually reminding us that in words we discover self. The best books of poetry, no matter how deeply we linger and meditate, no matter how we value them for their ability to yield in reading after reading, are also page-turners, and this is a book, once begun, you won't want to put down. And one you'll pick up again, year after year.--Alice Derry, Peninsula College

A book of poems by Tess Gallagher is an event. They're beautifully presented and beautifully written. And they are powerful. The poet doesn't seem satisfied to write about pretty things; she wants her poems to matter. And they do. Poems about murderers and refugees and sad, tragic lives; poems about war and childhood and marriages and joy; and poems about the dead (those "dear ghosts"): a sparrow, her father, her mother, her husband. This is a book to savor. Read it slowly, then read it again. And again. It's so easy to miss the nuances, the subleties. Tess Gallagher writes of enormous themes, and she does so in small and striking language - intimately. You will devour this book and crave to "take the next bite / and say, I believe it."

Published fourteen years after the author's previous poetry book, Dear Ghosts is the seventh collection and long-awaited return of Tess Gallagher's poetic voice. Featuring poems in which ghosts of the past are summoned and discoursed with in the present day, Dear Ghosts speaks with such spectral figures as the deceased beloved, the long-dead father, and victims of holocaust and war. Gallagher confronts her own aging, illness, and mortality with grace, modesty, and good humor in this insightful and reflective collection. "Knives in the Borrowed House": Don't sharpen them. / Expectation, more dangerous / than any blade.