An Evening with Poet Christian Collier | The Book & Cover
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Literary Arts
In his debut poetry collection, Greater Ghost, Christian Collier, an extraordinary Black Southern poet, precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member and the specter of police brutality.
With a profound awareness of literary tradition, Collier enters into the American canon and dialogues with Black Southern noir—a poem like “Beloved,” whose title expresses not only a genuine tenderness in its term of endearment but invokes Morrison, contextualizes this book within the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S., presenting again the prolific losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time, and yet remembers the resilience of love and transformative possibility of self-actualization from inside tragedy.
In addition to his debut collection, Greater Ghost, Collier is also the author of the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His works have appeared in December, Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal. More about him and his work can be found at www.christianjcollier.com. Electric Lit did a cover reveal feature on Greater Ghost in May. You can access the article here: https://electricliterature.com/exclusive-cover-reveal-of-greater-ghost-by-christian-collier/.
Collier's work has also earned praise from many authors in the field, including Ruben Quesada, Melissa Studdard, Gabrielle Bates, and many others:
Christian Collier's evocative poetry collection, Greater Ghost, invites readers on a journey that touches upon themes of faith, hope, and the search for meaning. In Sauna, he describes breath as a temporary beast, “a frightened deer sometimes sprinting / away & out of view to underscore the transient nature of life and our constant quest for sustenance and survival. With poignant and vivid imagery, Collier captures fleeting moments of happiness and shadows that often lurk behind them. He writes, Loss is the language living pours between our teeth. / In a way, we are what sits between two broken bones. This body as a vessel underscores the tension between the internal self and external forces. Don’t wait. Dive into a world where every poem is a discovery. Christian Collier's poems are tender and haunting.
—Ruben Quesada
If “the wound remains an open border,” as Christian J. Collier tells us in Greater Ghost, so, too, does the heart. How else could a poet so brilliantly transmute suffering into metaphor, lamentation into beauty, and the ghosts of his dead into an otherworldly wisdom? I could quote line after line after line of astoundingly gorgeous writing, but the thing I really want you to know is that grief has transformed Collier into someone “perforated and new,” someone who through his own openness has become a portal to truth, and I, for one, hope to never miss another word of that truth.
—Melissa Studdard
With ominous insights and images that provoke both horror and awe, Collier explores the vulnerable ecotones where beings encounter and belong to one another, in love and in grief. When I read this book, I feel the boundaries overflow; I feel mourning’s relentless parade and accept its invitation to a tender ongoingness. Greater Ghost is an incredibly moving collection, both nightmarish and beautiful. Here are poems populated by the dead, pulsing with life.
—Gabrielle Bates
Information Source: The Book & Cover | eventbrite
