The Village of New Ghosts by Winifred Hughes

Praise for The Village of New Ghosts

“The task of ‘the poet’ is brilliantly fulfilled with sonics, structure, detail, richness and care. But where this book truly exceeds and excels is in creating a hologram of emotions, a reality we can enter, where aesthetics are crisp and clear enough to create a new paradigm. Poetics that bring emotional worlds into existence have to be held in place with mastery. Someone is obviously in charge of this work. Someone is in control of its precise syntax and beautiful heart. I never wanted to stop reading.”

Grace Cavalieri, Henry Morgenthau III Poetry Prize Judge & author of The Long Game

“In Hughes’ work we enter into a stunning linguistic and emotional landscape of give and take, of push and pull, each step forward a constant realignment of understanding of nature and history, of temporality itself. ‘How can I lose what has not been?’ Hughes writes. And ‘Will I simply step out of / chronology?’ The Village of New Ghosts moves brilliantly by way of questioning. There is a hesitation, a shifting back and forth between the known and the unknowable, what can be reached and that which one, despite all odds, continues moving towards. Everything ‘still so familiar, yet so estranged.’”

EJ Colen, author of What Weaponry and The Green Condition

“There is a moment in our life that we know deep within ourselves, yet we ask will it be ‘lost or more itself’ if we write it down? Only Winifred Hughes asks such questions in her breathtakingly expansive yet focused book. Stand by the water, ask ‘What does the water remember / as it slides in and out of itself’? She suggests an answer, not the answer, but one along with others that you will not be able to shake off.”

David Sten Herrstrom, author of Light as Experience and Imagination from Paleolithic to Roman Times