Overview

A timely and poignant poetry collection by acclaimed author and former Poet Laureate of Kentucky Silas House, including the poem read at Governor Andy Beshear's 2023 inauguration and an interview by Barbara Kingsolver. Silas House is known throughout the South as a quintessential person of letters-a novelist, music journalist, environmental activist, columnist, and the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky. His first full-length collection of poetry blends his Appalachian upbringing with his ongoing relation to the natural world. Poems of praise for community and the collective appear alongside others tinged with nostalgia and grief when House keenly observes the loss of rural America as he once knew it. Returning to his touchstone subjects, Silas recalls wild places, echoes stories from a lingering and living past, and explores an abiding connection to family, friends, and fellow artists.

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9781958888698

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Early in Silas House’s poetry collection All These Ghosts, the landscape is set so beautifully, so skillfully, so convincingly, that I carried the Kentucky mountains and its people with me as I turned every consequent page, feeling the accumulation of love, and love’s losses, as if watching a wild onion grow, that ancient symbol of complicated but natural love. There is Wordsworthian eloquence in Silas House’s impressive and gorgeous poetry debut. What a gift to readers everywhere.”—Kathleen Driskell, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2025–26 and author of Goat-Footed Gods: Poems

Author Information

Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels: Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, The Coal Tattoo, Eli the Good, Same Sun Here, Southernmost, and Lark Ascending. He is a recipient of the 2023 Southern Book Prize, the 2023 Booklist Editors' Choice, two Nautilus Book Awards, the Duggins Prize (the largest award for LGBTQ writers in the nation), and many other honors, including being longlisted for the 2019 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2023 he became Poet Laureate of Kentucky and was a Grammy finalist for writing and producing the first country music video to feature a gay love story. In 2022 he served as a fiction judge for the National Book Awards. His writing has appeared recently in Time, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, Garden and Gun, and many other leading publications. He is based in Lexington, KY.

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