{"product_id":"the-seventh-town-of-ghosts-isbn-9780771004452","title":"The Seventh Town of Ghosts","description":"\u003cb\u003eTrillium Book Award for Poetry, Finalist\u003cbr\u003eGerald Lampert Memorial Award, Shortlist\u003cbr\u003ePat Lowther Memorial Award, Shortlist\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eCBC Poetry Prize finalist and National Magazine Award honoree Faith Arkorful’s breathtaking, surpassingly thoughtful debut collection of poems.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHauntings form the canopy of \u003ci\u003eThe Seventh Town of Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e. These titular towns, centred in yesterdays, tomorrows, and the ongoing, lead to a special kind of singing: songs to the reader who wrestles with existence, the unsure peace within family, and the often-tense interdependence of life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere, discernment is ever-present, guided by Faith Arkorful’s insights on not only the ravages of the state and the police upon the Black family and life at large, but also on a kaleidoscope of connections—sisterhood, daughterhood, kinship, solitude, death, romance—and how tenderness, chosen and repeated, can shield against life’s blows. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese towns also enchant, shape-lifting through humour, irony, and the small refractions of language where Arkorful guides us through the fault lines and the undertow, in the form of fruit, island volcanoes, Formula 1, and the expansive hum of life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis poet-as-sojourner bears careful, caring witness, her attention reserved not only for her living and her dead but hyphenated two-fold by the fragile things and the lasting things. These poems remind us of what contours our mysterious and fleeting presence on Earth.\u003cb\u003ePraise for\u003ci\u003e The Seventh Town of Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e and Faith Arkorful\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTrillium Book Award for Poetry, Finalist \u003cbr\u003eGerald Lampert Memorial Award, Shortlist\u003cbr\u003ePat Lowther Memorial Award, Shortlist\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Navigating \u003ci\u003eThe Seventh Town of Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e, one can’t help but come away in awe of such a powerful and moving lyric voice. Here in its pages, we find grief, longing, and the will to survive embodied and tangibly real. Even in the wake of police violence, state injustice and betrayal, the speaker’s voice determinedly and profoundly carries us forward beneath the blanket of stars, haunted by the memories of people and places no longer here or left far behind. In a world that threatens to erase and diminish, these poems burn with so much life, movement, and incandescent beauty.” —2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Jury\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Seventh Town of Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e by Faith Arkorful is a reckoning in slow circles around family, forgiveness and the fundamental question of how to weigh a life. The collection artfully evolves intimate relationships and a deepening selfhood across a lifetime of revisited landscapes, shaped, in part, by startling, unexpected metaphoric turns on the sinister trickstering of state, police and other every-day violence and violation. Fully sensorial, earth-grounded and suffused with spirit, \u003ci\u003eThe Seventh Town of Ghosts \u003c\/i\u003emeticulously etches a path of survival from origin to acceptance, laced with measures of hope held in delicate balance.” —2025 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Jury \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Faith Arkorful’s poems are full of living. Despite, because of, on the edge of, in and through the body, history, grief and tenderness, \u003ci\u003eThe Seventh Town of Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e is heartfelt music here. And magic.” —Christina Sharpe, author of \u003ci\u003eOrdinary Notes\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Seventh Town of Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e invites us into an intimacy of collisions, siblings, stars, saltwater, citrus fruit, and blood, as well as the threat of enforcement, erasure, and all ‘the prerequisites of violence.’ Arkorful’s voice is lucent and uncompromising as she charts and queries both her relations and selfhood in poems that are at once as fulsome as ‘a blanket of stars [and] delicate as a spider’s web.’ This is a work I will return to for both its interrogation and celebration of the beauty and necessity of haunting.” —Liz Howard, author of \u003ci\u003eLetters in a Bruised Cosmos\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Insistently lyrical (‘I AM NOBODY ELSE BUT MY OWN BECOMING’), \u003ci\u003eThe Seventh Town of Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e sings flesh and hauntings, asphalt and saltwater, earthworms and mathematics—sings the urgency, amidst enveloping noise, of bravest existential clarity: ‘I have no answers, only small honesties.’ Faith Arkorful is the poet we need, with fierce new philosophies, and a tongue for ‘both the acid and sweetness.’” —David Chariandy, author of \u003ci\u003eBrother \u003c\/i\u003eFaith Arkorful’s work has appeared in \u003ci\u003eGUTS Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePeach Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePRISM International\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHobart Pulp\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eCanthius Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, among other places. In 2022 she was a semi-finalist in the 92NY’s Discovery Poetry Contest. She received an honourable mention at the 2020 National Magazine Awards and in 2019 was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Faith was born in Toronto, where she still resides.FAMILY AFFAIR\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethey say we are a family good at extending \/ i make a decision to hold\u003cbr\u003ea seminar on how to live \/ i schedule this party for my uncles on the first\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eday of spring \/ my dead uncles play hooky with the afterlife\u003cbr\u003eslipping out of their graves while the ground unthaws \/ the earth still soft\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ei could never play hooky myself \/ all my childhood my mother kept her\u003cbr\u003ehand wrapped around my wrist \/ a lightweight shackle held me\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003edown all nights \/ a weight my mother gifted me for my own sake \u003cbr\u003ethe taste of iron swirling in the mouth always \/ no shard of a \u003cbr\u003ecoconut to scoop out the pulp of the night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003emy dead uncles arrive to the seminar an hour late \/ they hover above \u003cbr\u003ethe chairs in my backyard \/ my living uncles arrive after the dead ones\u003cbr\u003eand the reunion is a big family affair \/ my uncles orbit around one another\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eand me \/ with haste \/ all the seminar pamphlets are\u003cbr\u003eout of my hands \/ papers with titles: \/ interactions with cops \u003cbr\u003eexplaining health complications to your doctor \/ drinks with bitters\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003emy uncles hand me back this polite literature \/ they insist upon \u003cbr\u003ean idea that in the afterlife \/ there is no time for posturing over\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eanything other than perhaps a garden \/ someone you love deeply\u003cbr\u003ethe truth of it they insist \/ is that most of living you never really learn\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe police come through \/ as they always do \/ breaking the warmth\u003cbr\u003eof the reunion \/ my uncles sit together around a table playing dominoes\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe police lean over and ask to play \/ the police lean over to claim \u003cbr\u003ethat someone has called about the noise \/ the police are leaning over\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat noise, I ask. Half of the people here are dead. \/ my dead uncles\u003cbr\u003e do not speak in the presence of force \/ is that not what you wanted \u003cbr\u003ethis is the living of not knowing and wanting more \/ survival at\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe cost of pride \/ now that the police have arrived the party \u003cbr\u003emust end \/ my dead uncles \/ must return to the earth\u003cbr\u003ebefore night \/ when the ground hardens \/ and although the party\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003estarts late \/ it ends late \/ if not as late as we wanted \/ but still\u003cbr\u003e i feel so loved \/ i hold all my uncles together \/ they hold me \u003cbr\u003ein the spring we get used to the sun \/ staying for long\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003emy favourite void is from the valley of lateness \/ i love lateness\u003cbr\u003ei love it like i love my uncles \/ my late uncles \/ my late late uncles \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ealive and dead \/ oh, how i love \/ the suggestion that the earth\u003cbr\u003ecan extend \/ that there will always be room for more.","brand":"McClelland \u0026 Stewart","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301034709221,"sku":"NP9780771004452","price":18.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780771004452.jpg?v=1767741473","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-seventh-town-of-ghosts-isbn-9780771004452","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}