White Ghosts***,*** the debut collection by poet and novelist Katie
Hale, traces maternal lines, and the legacies of slavery and whiteness
interwoven into the fabric of America, through revealing, unflinching
poems. Travelling deep into an intimate history that spans both sides of
the Atlantic, Hale unravels the language haunting those narratives we
choose to tell in official versions - through museum labels and civic
statues - and in handed-down stories.
Transformational and challenging, these sharply-detailed poems
interrogate the bare bones of silence, complicity, difficult
inheritances and racial constructs. Via wagon routes or interstates, on
desert highways or in the landscapes of northern England, through nature
and through human culture, questions of ownership and power are writ
into the journey. Through four hundred years of female migration, the
poems in White Ghosts use art, music, and lyrical reworking of the
curated space, to address white guilt: what is lost through generations,
and what is passed on?
