Novelist Silas House (Clay's Quilt; Lark Ascending) was Kentucky's poet laureate in 2023 when he read "Those Who Carry Us" at Governor Andy Beshear's inauguration. That poem appears in House's first poetry collection, All These Ghosts, and serves as an excellent introduction to the tender yet probing character of these poems. House is a storyteller, and the poem uses two childhood memories of a loved one carrying him out of danger: once from a tornado, the other "as the flood seeped beneath our door/ my mother sat me on her hip./ She carried me, muddy foam/ striking her knees, then her waist." These stories evoke the fear of uncertain times even while turning--as the poem does--insistently toward hope and gratitude for the ordinary folks who continue to carry one another, "standing with their arms out, saying/ Come here, and rest. Let me help you."
Other poems employ a more formal structure, including "Cousins," a pantoum, and "Ghost Garden Sestina," which echoes the ghosts of the collection's title. Many of the poems are similarly haunted, with House rejecting the worst parts of growing up in the American South while drawing strength from the people and the places that formed him. "Blues" describes the practice of painting "porch ceilings/ haint-blue" to ward off ghosts, then explains, "but/ that never worked for us. We lived/ with the past breathing down our necks." This lively collection is perfect for anyone with complicated feelings about home, "a long way gone from that place, yet/ marked by it, still." --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian