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Everything is Ghosts  (Finishing Line Press, 2024)​



 

Everything is Ghosts is a meditation on the fragility of new independence, and a juxtaposition of personal histories-in-progress with the troubled histories of a college town’s residents—many of whom are dead. This collection’s poems follow a group of college friends through their experiences with burgeoning adulthood, as they reckon with where they’ve been and whom they might be turning into. Whether braving a dorm haunted by the spirit of a basketball player and nebulous “shadow people,” daring each other out onto a murder-scene bridge at midnight, witnessing ghost hunters in the campus library, or wrestling personal hauntings like vehicular accidents, drug use, the after-effects of polio, and the passage of time, the players in Everything is Ghosts learn to keep one eye open at all times. As they create, carouse, and hold each other up, they learn that being haunted can have more than just one meaning.

Advance Praise:

These luminous poems reveal how a college campus can be a whole cosmos where to ghost is not to disappear but to offer one’s presence, one’s abundance. Never have I encountered a collection so haunted by warmth, so peopled by tender stories. Tyler Robert Sheldon is a poet whose trust in language is only rivaled by his love for the places where strange meetings are inevitable, where libraries are sacred, "where silence is sacred as saddles in summer.”

Chen Chen 

author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

In Tyler Robert Sheldon’s Everything is Ghosts young adulthood is a haunted time. Landscapes, dorm rooms, dreams and friends are all swarmed with ghosts. The specters in dreams are always more than imagination, and memory is always scratching the walls at night. Even the future is a ghost. But not everything is shadows; this book reminds us that our fear of death is what reminds us to hold loved ones close, to really appreciate the unbearable brightness of our lives.

Traci Brimhall

Poet Laureate of Kansas 2023-2026

author of Love Prodigal

 

Refreshingly tender and celebratory, Everything is Ghosts offers a series of coming-of-age vignettes, sometimes playful, sometimes eerie, and always pulling us—paradoxically—into the future and the past at once: “The road opens before me / and yawns like the mouth / of a bright, waiting ghost.” This collection centers on a group of college kids as they face the joy and fear and awkwardness of newfound freedom. Among the cast is a mastiff terrified of pool noodles; a friend who channels a spirit named Gwen, who warns “Try not to piss me off”; and, of course, a whole chorus of ghosts, who seem to haunt with more benevolence than rage, more compassion than judgment. The author, too, embraces a stance of compassion, giving us a collection that—while spooky—is ultimately overwhelmed by warmth.

Anders Carlson-Wee

author of Disease of Kings

 

Although we work here, we don't all live with the legacy: mother and father and son all go to the same university, and all take up the mantle to teach English. Tyler examines his thoughtful, searching “early years" as a college student, where the mind enlarges and so does the heart. Richard Russo and Michael Chabon both take a look at university life, with humor and with heart, but not with the precision that Tyler does, not with a hand on the pulse of what it is to make it an entire life.

Kevin Rabas

Poet Laureate of Kansas 2017-2019

author of Improvise

 

Tyler Robert Sheldon's new collection invites us to listen to what's at the edges of our lives and callings from his first poem, “Legacies,” in which he writes: "The road opens before me / and yawns like the mouth / of a bright, waiting ghost." The characters along this road, the tender and fierce moments these poems encounter, and the truths landed on and unfurled altogether welcome us into one rite of passage after another. Each poem helps us pause enough to take in the world in real time as well as what has seeded and tended this time. Even the titles—from “It's Not Crazy If It's Real” to “And Then Everything Was Different” to “So Many Ways You Cannot See”—point us toward new and renewed ways to see our pasts as well as to arrive in the present right now. This is a marvelous collection that multiplies its meanings through time.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Poet Laureate of Kansas 2009-2013

author of How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems

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