Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Greater Ghost by Christian Collier which will be published by Four Way Books on September 15, 2024.
“Wholly. / The way a famished fire washes over a building’s flesh & marrow,” Christian J. Collier writes of the consuming revelations of death and love. In his debut poetry collection Greater Ghost, this 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.
The poetic brilliance of this work manifests not only in its lyrical gestures and soft musicality but in its persistent double consciousness, the terror of mortality encapsulated and amplified by praise for the living. With 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 also 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.
Despite all this, Collier never settles into platitudes or pat oversimplifications. The dual meaning of every line honors the complexity of experience and vast terrains of contradictory emotions. This poem concludes with a consummate haunting: “I was divined by you. Made angel already.” Inside this ending, the collection’s thesis rests, that to love and be loved means to encounter the self as a mystery awaiting divination, an incomplete riddle whose solution and salvation depends upon entering into relationship with the world and its people. At the same time, it implies consecration, to be anointed as holy—and therefore accepted and understood—exactly as you are. None of us need prove we are worthy; our test, and our mandate, is to cherish one another as perpetual works in progress. This is the supreme wisdom encapsulated within “made angel already,” how it indicts the injustice of structural violence and mourns premature death while also proclaiming the here and now as sacred, counting each of us among the always and already complete, the fundamentally miraculous, the perfection of perfect enough.
Here is the cover, artwork by Mario Henrique.
Author Christian J. Collier: “By the time I’d assembled the first version of what would become my debut full-length collection in early 2020, at least seven people in and around my family had passed, so I felt very strongly that literal ghosts surrounded my work. I thought it would be fitting to acknowledge and celebrate them given how many of the poems are talking to and about the spirits I’m haunted by, and the title Greater Ghost found me. It felt apt for the open and honest ways I believed my art was addressing my apparitions.
During my breaks on my day job, thinking about what the book would be, I began delving into the things visual artists were posting on Instagram, and that endeavor introduced me to Portuguese painter Mario Henrique. I was immediately bowled over by his portraits due to the explosion of color each contained as well as the faces he’d labored into existence. Each boasted eyes that felt both alive and as if they were peering back at me. However, when I saw Fragmenta no. 5, I thought it perfectly nailed the essence of my collection. The face in the portrait appears ghostlike—a bit blurry with erased and missing parts. Its eyes are black, as if they’ve witnessed too much and are now cursed. The speaker or speakers in my book are wounded and not all the way present due to what has been lost and taken away through life as well as death. Their world, much like the world of the portrait, fluctuates between the dark and the light and both.
I took a screenshot of it, knowing somehow it would be the cover of Greater Ghost and the image sat in my phone for a few years until I was asked to submit cover ideas for consideration. Over that span of time as the manuscript changed, I revisited it every few months—imagining how it would, hopefully, introduce readers to the world I built. Thankfully, Ryan Murphy at Four Way Books loved it, too, and Mario agreed to allow us to use it.
I’ve been stunningly blessed with the covers for my books so far—my chapbook with Bull City Press, The Gleaming of the Blade, designed by Ross White and featuring art by Nate Austin, features a portrait of a Black man’s back as he faces a wall of newspaper clippings that document racial conflicts old and contemporary. In Greater Ghost, the portrait faces the reader. Both works dare the audience to remain engaged and resist the urge to flinch or turn away. The poems between both covers do the same. I can’t express how honored I am to have Mario’s art be the face of Greater Ghost.”
Read the original article here