BY JOSHUA DIAMOND
This is part of a two-part essay series on the emergence of ghosts in poetry. Take a look back at There’s a ghost in my poetry, Part 1: G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher’s Your Father on the Train of Ghosts.
If Harold Ramis, in Dr. Egon Spengler’s infinite wisdom, has taught us anything it is this, that 1) print is dead 2) collecting molds, spores, and fungus can be a fun and exciting hobby, and 3) ghosts need busting. Then the ‘90s reared their slightly less fuzzy head, and Demi and Swayze showed us the tender side of ghosts—that some ghosts just want to make sweet, clay hand-love to us. Matthew Rohrer’s Destroyer and Preserver is the first collection of poetry to make sweet, clay hand-love to me in a long time, albeit less sloppy.
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Before Matthew Zapruder’s Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon Press) started haunting my bookshelf last fall I caught a couple blips on the old poetry-ghost detector: the apparition of poet-as-little-girl appearing and disappearing through the walls of the tightly-contained sections in Julia Story’s Post Moxie (Sarabande Books, 2010), and the disarmingly honest ectoplasmic-robot speaker in Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine (Caketrain Books, 2010), so aware of his organs, origins, and his wires. Ghosts walk among us, or float. And if 2010 kicked off the ghost craze in American Poetry, 2011 is poised to become the Year of the 
In the opening pages of Bartók’s memoir, as she faces the impending death of her long-estranged mother, Bartók explains that she has become more like this woman than she ever could have dreamed. Having suffered a serious brain injury from a car accident seven years before, Bartók also finds herself overwhelmed by stimuli and often unable to perform simple life tasks or remember events in her life, even from a few hours earlier. Her own unpolished writing, she says, is random and disjointed, very much like the work she later finds in notebooks that harbored the thoughts of her mother.
morning haiku is a testament to Sonia Sanchez’ perpetual offering of herself as she honors others and delivers her truths for devoted readers who have followed her since her revolutionary beginnings as a Black Power artist/activist and Black Studies creator. Sanchez’ utilization of a deceivingly simple poetic form is actually her self-pronounced homecoming to herself. Her personal connection to this short literary form, which she describes as a form that “make[s] you slow down and check out what’s happening in your life” began decades ago in a book store in New York City (morning haiku xiv). Sanchez grants recognition to social justice greats, including a set of haiku’s entitled For Freedom Sisters which honor an entourage of black women legends. Within this section we see her tenacity to the beauty and existence of powerful black womanhood:
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“As with everything in the Middle East, nothing makes sense until you understand the past, and the past is never straightforward.” Such commences Tamara Chalabi’s first book, Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family (HarperCollins). Part history of Iraq, part ancestral memoir, and part political critique, the text stands to reckon with others of the “return to homeland” vein or East/West “exile literature.” Chalabi—who dubs her father, Ahmad, “a leading opposition figure to Saddam Hussein’s fallen regime”—masks the latent political defense of her father (which resurfaces again and again throughout the book) with an authorial disclaimer in the prologue:
While his writings were only recently translated into English less than a decade ago, Hungarian author Sandor Marai provides a Modernist-realist window into life on the Continent between the twentieth century’s major world wars. Portraits of a Marriage, a triangularly-structured love story, originally published in Budapest in 1941, has been newly translated and will soon be re-released by Knopf. Framed namely by the social classes each of the three major characters finds him or herself in, they grapple with the complexity of love in Marai’s characteristically realist fashion. All ideals of love, romance, art, and even post-war meaning, are dissected, artificially taken up, and later destroyed by the narrative events that unfold. The “real”, the true—the real husband, or true art—prove to be mere mirages. Subdivided among the three characters’ perspectives, Portraits of a Marriage reads much like a trio of novellas that 
Extended prose poem, documentary, elegy—C.D. Wright’s One With Others is a haunting, genre-defying reclamation of the past that burns with the need for its readers to know. Its stark tapestry is woven from a number of interrelated strands: tales of and from the 1969 “Walk Against Fear” from West Memphis through the sundown towns of the Arkansas delta to Little Rock, a walk led by a man known as Sweet Willie Wine and carried out by a small group of African American men flanked by bristling crowds and angry police officers; the story and wisdom of Wright’s mentor Margaret Kaelin McHugh, fondly called “V” by her “student acolytes,” who was the only white person to participate in the march; testimonials and anecdotes of V from several of her seven children and friends; and personal 
