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The Seventh Town of Ghosts: Poems
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 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.
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 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.
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Paperback
Published March 26, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 13, 2026
Faith Arkorful’s style is not my cup of tea. Or so I thought after reading several of the poems in this collection. It’s not that I didn’t get what she was saying – I generally don’t try to get poetry, I just try to go with the flow of it, feel its rhythm and follow the beat. A lot of the poems seemed to be just a string of relatively random, nonsensical sentences put on the same page. But as I delved deeper into The Seventh Town a coherent, unified image began to form. A person, a life. As is often the case with me and poetry, the meaning and understanding remain a bit hazy, fluid and highly interpretative – but that is why I love reading poetry.
October 2, 2024
wow!!! So many beautiful conceptions of sisterhood and family that cracks a reader right open. Very hard to pick favourites buuuuut some include:
Confession
Quiet time
Justin Trudeau dreams in blackface
The seventh town of hallelujahs
sisterhood food mathematics
Undoing
oh god!
Confession
Quiet time
Justin Trudeau dreams in blackface
The seventh town of hallelujahs
sisterhood food mathematics
Undoing
oh god!
April 21, 2024
woo, this collection was fire!
Faith’s analogies are tender and familiar. Fruits, subway rides, car rides, science, ghosts, prayer—she takes things i don’t think to make poetic, poetic! Her voice feels like a breath of fresh air. I’m finding it difficult to encapsulate how i feel about this work, it’s just so clever and poignant and beautiful!
Standouts and favourites of mine are:
* You get what you get — page 21
* In the universe where i run everything—page 23
* For my splintered self—page 27
* West End Gothic—page 33
* No Different—page 42
* Lake of Rage—page 48
* Heart of Palm—page 54
* I’ve learned after falling in love the first time—page 60
* Oh God—page 72
* The Flowers—page 81
* Linked—page 87
* This Isn’t the Life—page 89
Faith’s analogies are tender and familiar. Fruits, subway rides, car rides, science, ghosts, prayer—she takes things i don’t think to make poetic, poetic! Her voice feels like a breath of fresh air. I’m finding it difficult to encapsulate how i feel about this work, it’s just so clever and poignant and beautiful!
Standouts and favourites of mine are:
* You get what you get — page 21
* In the universe where i run everything—page 23
* For my splintered self—page 27
* West End Gothic—page 33
* No Different—page 42
* Lake of Rage—page 48
* Heart of Palm—page 54
* I’ve learned after falling in love the first time—page 60
* Oh God—page 72
* The Flowers—page 81
* Linked—page 87
* This Isn’t the Life—page 89
April 14, 2024
An astonishingly confident and expansive debut, Arkorful's poems trace a novelistic journey of discovery through a dazzling array of forms and themes.
Making stops through interstitial ghostly towns of tiny refractory verse, her poems examine family bonds and ancestry, state and societal violence, the experience of Blackness and being—as the multiphonic perspectives come to terms with the hardness of life but also its joys and hopes, the hum of life and deep love. Arkorful has a lot to say about police, the disparagement and fetishization of Black bodies, and the dark depths of isolation. But also about planting and growing a rooted love for the world, about the relationships that can fight those dark forces, as well as the courageous movement of the self to get there.
I'm not used to seeing a full personal arc of growth and acceptance in a poetry collection, and the effect is to make the work lie deeper in you as a cohesive whole, a complete book with the weight of a novel. Even as the highlights of some poems' fireworks will continue to awe you as wonders in their own right.
It is fascinating to feel the effect of the deliberate but nuanced repetition, the fruits, the accents, sleep, souls, the subway, the Black face and body, the multifaceted revisiting of subjects but with ever-shifting tone and purpose tracing a larger understanding. Arkorful's lucidity as a poet using simple smooth-polished words belies her thematic complexity using erasure, concrete poetry, shape poetry, diptych, to suck out the full aching marrow of her words.
A poem called Ark erases and reinterprets the first page of Heart of Darkness as a punishing flood against colonial sin. Sisterhood Mathematics and Acrylics trace the deep and funny bonds of close kin. Lewis Hamilton is a brilliant ode to perseverance through Formula One with a closing line that will take away your breath. There is pain here, in Ode to a Drunken Voice, but there is beauty and joy and humour, in Gravenhurst. Arkorful plays not only all the notes, but a full orchestra of them.
An immense talent.
http://lawrencedebbs.home.blog/2024/0...
Making stops through interstitial ghostly towns of tiny refractory verse, her poems examine family bonds and ancestry, state and societal violence, the experience of Blackness and being—as the multiphonic perspectives come to terms with the hardness of life but also its joys and hopes, the hum of life and deep love. Arkorful has a lot to say about police, the disparagement and fetishization of Black bodies, and the dark depths of isolation. But also about planting and growing a rooted love for the world, about the relationships that can fight those dark forces, as well as the courageous movement of the self to get there.
I'm not used to seeing a full personal arc of growth and acceptance in a poetry collection, and the effect is to make the work lie deeper in you as a cohesive whole, a complete book with the weight of a novel. Even as the highlights of some poems' fireworks will continue to awe you as wonders in their own right.
It is fascinating to feel the effect of the deliberate but nuanced repetition, the fruits, the accents, sleep, souls, the subway, the Black face and body, the multifaceted revisiting of subjects but with ever-shifting tone and purpose tracing a larger understanding. Arkorful's lucidity as a poet using simple smooth-polished words belies her thematic complexity using erasure, concrete poetry, shape poetry, diptych, to suck out the full aching marrow of her words.
A poem called Ark erases and reinterprets the first page of Heart of Darkness as a punishing flood against colonial sin. Sisterhood Mathematics and Acrylics trace the deep and funny bonds of close kin. Lewis Hamilton is a brilliant ode to perseverance through Formula One with a closing line that will take away your breath. There is pain here, in Ode to a Drunken Voice, but there is beauty and joy and humour, in Gravenhurst. Arkorful plays not only all the notes, but a full orchestra of them.
An immense talent.
http://lawrencedebbs.home.blog/2024/0...
March 31, 2024
Beautifully written! There’s something so special and magical in this collection of poems. My highlights include: “Two Lefts”, “Oh God!”, “Sisterhood Food Mathematics”, “I’ve Learned After Falling In Love The First Time”, “Hyenas”, “Vultures”.
June 14, 2024
Excited to read the words of a new poet, brimming so full of life and love. The grit and the rawness is palpable, and so is the laughter.
Enjoyed the allusions to island life, the strong sentiments of family, and the realness of Toronto.
Can't wait to read what you write next Faith.
Enjoyed the allusions to island life, the strong sentiments of family, and the realness of Toronto.
Can't wait to read what you write next Faith.
November 2, 2024
This is the type of poetry that both makes me wish to write more and simultaneously reminds me that my writing has long to go.
Sincerity, anguish, humor, all wrapped together in a web of poems, Faith really has a way with words.
Sincerity, anguish, humor, all wrapped together in a web of poems, Faith really has a way with words.
January 3, 2025
3.75 rounded up. I told myself I would endeavor to read more poetry in 2025, and this was my first attempt at that. I enjoyed many of the poems in this and look forward to discovering more in this genre.
April 7, 2024
My favourite poems in this collection:
- Origin story
- Elegy for the drunken voice
- Not sorry
- ENDLESSSSSSSSS
- Sisterhood as light retractive
- This isn't the life
- Origin story
- Elegy for the drunken voice
- Not sorry
- ENDLESSSSSSSSS
- Sisterhood as light retractive
- This isn't the life
June 8, 2024
oh, this is such a good book; https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2024...
September 25, 2024
4/5 stars
This is simply an excellent collection of poetry.
This is simply an excellent collection of poetry.
February 24, 2026
One of my fave collections.
June 14, 2024
Beautiful, eloquent, moving, impactful, empowering, devastating, humorous. A collection of truly wonderful poems.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews