Ghost County

by John McCarthy

“In John McCarthy’s arresting debut, the middle of America reveals itself to be a belly full of opportunities and frustrations.” —Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

In John McCarthy’s debut poetry collection, lifetimes are spent traveling in pickup trucks across the Midwest, exploring spaces between love and its imperfect manifestations. Ghost County drives blue-collar back roads and guides readers through personal meditations about heritage, loss, and the desire to reimagine the past and future. Dateless baseball trophies, the world’s largest catsup bottle, and swivel set televisions illustrate a Midwest that is recognizable and echoes with its own poetry, affirming the traditions and experiences that bind this region to self and self to region.

“Ghost County…is a book that never stops opening up.” —Adam Clay, author of Stranger and Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World

“[I]n these gritty poems, McCarthy exposes a grimmer reality tainted by drugs, alcohol, poverty, and violence. [T]his is a hardscrabble life where time stretches past into future, back into the past, and all seems predetermined to remain the same. McCarthy’s poems pay close attention to a darker middle life, and they do not flinch.” —Sandy Longhorn, author of The Alchemy of My Mortal Form

“The poems in Ghost County marvelously articulate the strange, fluctuating space between the real and the imagined…Impassioned and insightful, this is a book that travels between those very real places not found on any map: memory, disappointment, and hope.” —Charlotte Pence, author of Many Small Fires and The Branches, the Axe, the Missing

“The way [McCarthy] imagines and executes these lyric Midwestern narratives renders the place both familiar and strange, humdrum and ethereal. McCarthy has the craft and vision of someone who’s been at this for a very long time.” —Chad Simpson, author of Tell Everyone I Said Hi

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

First published January 29, 2016

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[James Figy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a chance to buy this book at AWP, when I visited the Midwestern Gothic table. The poet was there, and one of the MG editors tried to sell it, saying, "I think he's a really great poet." Still, I was reluctant, and decided to spend my money on other books at other booths. When I saw John McCarthy read from the book the following day, passionately shouting out the lines like curses, I knew what a stupid decision I'd made.
This collection examines what it means to live on the edge of Midwestern life. No matter how flat the landscape McCarthy describes, the speaker in each poem teeters on the edge of a cliff. Not sure at times about going on, and at other times unable to stop. He zooms through Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, and flat expanses in between in eighteen poems title Pickup Truck, as he explains to the reader: "All we can do is have ideas about not / having ideas about hope." At the end of the journey, he turns key and "listen[s] to the cooling / engine click its tongue."
It's bleak at times, but rustbelt small towns, populated trailer parks and rusting pickups and desperate youth, aren't meant to be beautiful. However, there is this element of aliveness that strings its way through the entire book. Broken and downtrodden as it may be, the Midwest still remains strong. And the hardiness of its people shows in this collection as well. It's like the speaker in "The Weight of Dirt and Rust" says as he stares across the street at a shitty little shed of a bar: "I realize that I am young and lucky."

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, aching.

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