Ghost Hour

by Laura Cronk

Sometimes compact, sometimes expansive, the poems in Ghost Hour emanate from adolescence and other liminal spaces, considering girlhood and contemporary womanhood―the ways both are fraught with the pleasures and limits of embodiment. As in her previous poetry, Laura Cronk writes personally, intimately, yet never without profound consideration of onslaught of contemporary violence, which we must love in spite of and rage against.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published December 15, 2020

Reviews

[April · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting and beautiful - memories so vivid they felt like my own.

[Emily Barker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intelligent, restless, sexy, angry poems that look back to Cronk's midwestern girlhood and her life as a young woman and mother in the big city. Written in precise, direct language that only seems simple, these poems like to surprise you. They will take you to places that you didn't expect.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura Cronk's Ghost Hour offers a throbbing phenomenology, of desire, loss, memory, and regret, a collection of poems where objects become subjects, and subjects objects, where ideas materialize and materials evaporate, where identities and other borders dissolve and so-called opposites refract, poems that, as Cronk writes, "fan the fire, / are the fire, / hold the water, / vanish in the / steam and smoke," poems that, in other words, are both cause and effect, and their residue, their evanescence.

[Python · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall, really lovely poetry book. I loved a lot of lines it (and wrote them down), but I also felt it declined after page 60. However, I'm still rating it five stars because this poem book is a lot about coming to terms with being middle-aged, so maybe I'll change my mind?

[A L]

Another great and surprising collection from LC.