Watch Me Trick Ghosts
Description
Strangers and spirits intersect between surreal city streets and tactile dreams in this fourth collection from the award-winning poet.
In Watch Me Trick Ghosts, Robert Krut reveals a city weaving between a surreal consciousnesses and concrete imagination, where speakers are fully aware that "the scars of the world are turning neon" ("Accidental Light"). Among them, spirits hide and appear in tree lines, behind bookcases, even "etching a name into a street sign pole with a knife" ("You Are the Street, You Are the Sleep"). These poems skillfully veer between lyrical moments of intimacy and urgent messages seemingly sent from the negative space surrounding a dream. It may be the case that "fear is a blade held in a lung" ("The Anxious Lever of Lowering Sky"), but in the quietest hours of night, strangers can connect through striking images that cast a spell.
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Person
Robert Krut is the author of The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire (Codhill Press, 2019), which received the Codhill Poetry Award; This Is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, 2013), which received the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Award; and The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). His poetry has appeared widely, in Blackbird, The Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Passages North, Poetry Vinyl, and others. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.