What Haunts Me

“What Haunts Me travels the map of personal history through a series of immersive, quietly stunning journeys. Author Bernadette Geyer’s collection observes labor in all shapes and forms, and breaks through to understanding of how our loves, joys, and griefs must be understood as part of a larger moment in time and place. But this book’s weighty cloth of intent is worn lightly thanks to the poet’s dry humor and gift for the lyric stitch—’Remembering is quick and sharp as a stumble,/unexpected as a fly/or a flurry of moonlight.’ These poems are full of beautiful surprises.”

–Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode: Poems

“Bernadette Geyer’s What Haunts Me is the apt title for a book where the past hallows the present tense. These are poems of place and family, American as a backyard pond full of Koi—reflections on Angkor Wat, the ruins of home, and a rundown steel town past its days. There is so much of human labor here, of funerals and family dinners, and dig downs into ancestry on the level of names. This is a book of poems that will haunt you with the lives it narrates long after you have read the last page.”

–Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys