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Georgia Poetry Prize
Through a Small Ghost: Poems
This collection of poems speaks to the grief and trauma associated with stillbirth and infertility. But more than that, these poems are concerned with how both parents deal with this trauma without letting it tear them or their relationship apart. There are threads beneath the surface of the poems that speak to the inequality in these relationships and in the male-female dynamic, whether this inequality is perceived or real. Dingman also questions the perception of reality itself when dealing with the traumatized mind.
Dingman asks the difficult questions that surround child-rearing. Are the children themselves everything the parents had hoped for? Is there still something missing? She explores the invisibility of the mother after she has children, as well as what a woman is willing to sacrifice in terms of body, country, and relationship. Set against changing political climates in Florida, Canada, and Denmark, these poems navigate the geopolitical differences that influence the experience of parenting.
Dingman asks the difficult questions that surround child-rearing. Are the children themselves everything the parents had hoped for? Is there still something missing? She explores the invisibility of the mother after she has children, as well as what a woman is willing to sacrifice in terms of body, country, and relationship. Set against changing political climates in Florida, Canada, and Denmark, these poems navigate the geopolitical differences that influence the experience of parenting.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published February 15, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 12, 2023
Perfection. I was in awe of the imagery, the unique line breaks, how the poet takes you by the hand and leads you down and into and through grief’s many manifestations. These are the kind of poems that force you to stop and breathe. You feel them in your pores. This collection will stay with me for weeks, probably months.
November 14, 2020
Easily one of the best poets writing today, this book is an MFA in language and tension. This book is the most perfect and haunted meditation on all the ways our minds, hearts and emotions vary each experience, the way it turns over and over again like a stalled engine. While dealing with such a heartbreaking issue this book forgoes sentimentality and reaches straight for tender and teeth
August 4, 2020
This is such a beautiful, tender-painful collection of poems.
February 3, 2021
One of the most breathtaking, heartbreaking, and artfully wrought collections I've ever read. It rippled through me. Everything is changed.
April 2, 2020
This is an emotional yet varied collection full of poems that keen. With stunning imagery and perfectly timed revelations, the book invites readers into a new form of empathy.
Some of my favorite lines:
There is something exotic about housing an idea.
Believe me : childbirth is war.
In the fields of my body, a pond.
Tell me the rain is the sky's apology.
The fields say future when they mean failure.
I am a starved city.
You numb. You savage.
Some of my favorite lines:
There is something exotic about housing an idea.
Believe me : childbirth is war.
In the fields of my body, a pond.
Tell me the rain is the sky's apology.
The fields say future when they mean failure.
I am a starved city.
You numb. You savage.
May 28, 2021
Amid such loss in 2020, what a comfort to read Dingman’s book exploring the surfaces of mourning in ways I’ve never encountered. Following a stillbirth, the poet catalogues her experience with daring honesty. A must for anyone who has loved, lost, & wrestled toward healing.
April 26, 2020
This collection is beautiful and devastating.
March 28, 2020
You can read my review of Through a Small Ghost here: https://www.theshorepoetry.org/shore-....
March 1, 2021
Chelsea Dingman is a poet who makes you feel as if you've entered the dream a little early. Otherness is something that happens to others, and pain hurts in two places at once. In through a small ghost, it is this meditative displacement that allows the work to both worship and curse the prolonged destiny of its sudden and devastating inheritance. Be it a projected disappearance or a vanishing root, Dingman identifies first the caller of the form that keeps us from so many shapes, and then the unreal form itself. As any breathing in this held verse might poke a hole in the haunting and send a smoke ring to show the fog how its wheels have come off, the poems keep their witness on the made from and made by, achieving not only something to be seen, but also something protected from watching. And in this protection are many spiritually assertive mercies, elegant and ruinous, gifts from reversal of which the most healing might be that when a thing goes, loss doesn't always get there first.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews