All These Ghosts - by Silas House (Hardcover)

About the Book

Includes an interview with the author conducted by Barbara Kingsolver.

Book Synopsis

A timely and poignant poetry collection by acclaimed author and former Poet Laureate of Kentucky Silas House, including the poem read at Governor Andy Beshear's 2023 inauguration and an interview by Barbara Kingsolver.

Silas House is known throughout the South as a quintessential person of letters--a novelist, music journalist, environmental activist, columnist, and the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky. His first full-length collection of poetry blends his Appalachian upbringing with his ongoing relation to the natural world. Poems of praise for community and the collective appear alongside others tinged with nostalgia and grief when House keenly observes the loss of rural America as he once knew it. Returning to his touchstone subjects, Silas recalls wild places, echoes stories from a lingering and living past, and explores an abiding connection to family, friends, and fellow artists.

Review Quotes

"Silas House is a southern institution, and his first collection of poetry is heartbreaking in all the best ways. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who loves the South more while continually working to understand its history and untangle its present."--Jason Isbell, Grammy-winning singer and songwriter

"An author I reliably depend on to represent our home with respect, beauty, and authenticity. I love the sense of pride that comes through in so many of these poems."--Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

"I never met a Kentuckian who wasn't either thinking about going home or actually going home: I've read that on more than one poster back home, and if you're kin to the land and the people there, then, well, you know. But what I didn't know until reading Silas House's poems was just how that aching lonesome began, even in childhood as I, too, 'was already grieving the passing of all I knew / and loved.' Harder still is the solastalgia--that kind of homesickness while still at home--that grows as you grow up, or as he puts it, not homesickness but 'timesickness, ' grieving a home lost to years as well as to floods, an Appalachia washed away by thoughtless development and acculturation alike. All These Ghosts then is a kind of elegy, but like any lament worth its salt, it's equally praise song--to soup beans and cornbread, to barefooted nights loud with insects, to those who have carried us through all that loss, and--just as Silas has done for me though this joyful, tender collection--carry us still."--Nickole Brown, author of Fanny Says

"Throughout this marvelous collection House brings a finely tuned and thoughtful seeing to every poem. As he describes a first touch of hands with a friend who 'never came out, ' we witness behind the 'green curtain' of a waterfall 'a small moment / of ecstasy ... akin to drowning.' Such close attention is as perfect as the Hopkins poem to which House pays tribute in his epigraph.

I was not surprised to find this acclaimed novelist spinning narrative poems that enthrall, enchant, and sometimes break your heart as in 'Behold This Dreamer' where the assault of a gay man is retold with stunning veracity and conviction. There are lyrical poems as well, possessing the same close attention to place and character found in all his work, thus making this a supremely impressive collection.

In another poem we read: 'Come here, and rest. Let me help you.' These poems most certainly will do just that and more. I can only give thanks we have as fine an artist as Silas House to share his wisdom in poems of such beauty and power."--Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and author of Dispatch from the Mountain State

"Early in Silas House's poetry collection All These Ghosts, the landscape is set so beautifully, so skillfully, so convincingly, that I carried the Kentucky mountains and its people with me as I turned every consequent page, feeling the accumulation of love, and love's losses, as if watching a wild onion grow, that ancient symbol of complicated but natural love. There is Wordsworthian eloquence in Silas House's impressive and gorgeous poetry debut. What a gift to readers everywhere."--Kathleen Driskell, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2025-26 and author of Goat-Footed Gods: Poems

"To read this book is to be carried along by story and song, by ferns and dogs and water and language. 'This is my tongue for you, / whispering our history: words words words, ' House assures the reader, and even as these poems grieve over the death of loved ones, over environmental devastation, over 'timesickness, ' over our country's embrace of fascism, they also ground the reader in a deep and abiding love of that place, of kin, of the 'little fire' that lights the hearts of all the 'everyday people who / keep the engine of the world / running.' All These Ghosts is deeply Appalachian in its plainspoken honesty, its heartrending use of narrative, and its subtle use of complex form. 'Do not truck in empire, ' it advises. After all, 'God lives in between / the pages of books.' In the mountains there is 'a secret cathedral / made of wildness.'"--Annie Woodford, author of Where You Come From Is Gone

About the Author

Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels: Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, The Coal Tattoo, Eli the Good, Same Sun Here, Southernmost, and Lark Ascending. He is a recipient of the 2023 Southern Book Prize, the 2023 Booklist Editors' Choice, two Nautilus Book Awards, the Duggins Prize (the largest award for LGBTQ writers in the nation), and many other honors, including being longlisted for the 2019 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2023 he became Poet Laureate of Kentucky and was a Grammy finalist for writing and producing the first country music video to feature a gay love story. In 2022 he served as a fiction judge for the National Book Awards. His writing has appeared recently in Time, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, Garden and Gun, and many other leading publications. He is based in Lexington, KY.