Smaller Ghosts: Centos by Jennifer Moore, selected by Ron Mohring as Number 7 in Volume 4 of our Editor’s Series.

Publication:  April 25, 2020 [100 copies]
25 pages
ISBN 978-1-949333-51-0
$ 9.00

Featuring cover art by our favorite digital artist, Paul Bilger, Smaller Ghosts presents a series of sixteen centos with sources texts ranging from Claribel Alegría and Dara Wier to John Donne and Emily Dickinson. 

Jennifer Moore was born and raised in Seattle. She is the author of The Veronica Maneuver (University of Akron Press, 2015) and Easy Does It (University of Akron Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. An associate professor of creative writing, she currently serves as Director of the School for the Humanities and Global Cultures at Ohio Northern University and lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.

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A single deer stepped 
into a stillness and watched me: 
nothing need be explained. 
Given lilacs, lilacs disappear.

Here is the painted world,
the ghost garden; our self behind
a heap of apples, concealed. 
A spectral game of hide and seek. 

I will always love the way a lost word
will come back, fanatic against
the vanishing. In the avenue of trees,
the haunt sings and it’s my music.

–Thank you to Jet Fuel Review for first publishing this poem.

• Order Jen’s chapbook here. Thank you for supporting this poet!