Greater Ghost

Greater Ghost is the debut poetry collection of Christian Collier, a Black Southern poet. The poems bring grief and gratitude together, stitching them over the wounds the book examines.

The collection moves between private and public hauntings, written as elegies. It treats the physical loss of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member, and it confronts the shadow of police brutality.

Collier writes with a deep awareness of literary tradition, entering the American canon and conversing with Black Southern noir. The poem "Beloved" is one example. Its title carries real tenderness as a term of endearment and also calls up Toni Morrison. The poem places the book within the long history of racial injustice in the United States and shows the repeated losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time. Even so, it holds on to the resilience of love and the chance of self-actualization from within tragedy.