Emily Hockaday, "Naming the Ghost" (Cornerstone Press, 2022)

New Books in Poetry

Emily Hockaday is a poet from Queens who writes about ecology, astronomy, and the city landscape, alongside more personal subjects. Her first collection Naming the Ghost (Cornerstone Press, 2022) tackles the onset of chronic illness and parenting through grief. Her next full-length, In a Body, will be out in October with Harbor Editions. This collection looks at chronic illness through the lens of ecopoetry. Emily is the author of five chapbooks and has had poems in a variety of print and online journals. You can learn more about her at www.emilyhockaday.com.

Naming the Ghost, Hockaday's first full-length collection, is a strikingly unique collection of poems that take on the grief of losing a parent just as the author becomes one herself during the time between onset of her chronic symptoms and a diagnosis that she was convinced, all evidence be damned, was fatal. Written during what the author herself calls her nervous breakdown, Naming the Ghost gives the reader a voicey visceral, encapsulating experience of the anxiety, disorientation and kind of fear of the tempts one to do reckless things that comprise the no-man's land between knowing something's wrong but not yet knowing its name. You can find Naming The Ghost on Cornerstone Press's store and on Amazon.

You can learn more about the interviewer Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com.

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