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This book gets to me the way a great opera does or a noir movie. Often eerie, always fierce and intense, it reminds us that death and the loss of love are never far away. But as one poem says, we lose ourselves in what saves us. In work as savvy as it is elegant, Christopher Locke shows us a blaze burning brightly among the shadows. It is the fire of art, and it is there that we warm our hands.
—David Kirby, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University
Christopher Locke's stunning collection Music for Ghosts paints a landscape inhabited by voices "wounded by the curse of dumb choices", where "God fills the clouds with his absence," and even "dusk presses the windows until they bruise." Locke's poems—tender amid the grit—seek salvation and absolution as antidote to the frailties of the human condition, with a yearning both gorgeous and universal.
—Tina Cane, Poet Laureate of Rhode Island and author of Body of Work and Year of the Murder Hornet
Downright unnerving in its directness, Music for Ghosts exposes a father lost and wanting in the middle of life. The poems themselves seem to plead—with us, or with God, or both—for any hope of connection, and the result is profoundly moving. With great emotional range and a gift for crafting immersive narratives, Christopher Locke gives us a book that is raw yet deeply reflective, haunted yet deeply joyous.
—Anders Carlson-Wee, author of The Low Passions
What Christopher Locke is able to do consistently in these poems is complicate the familiar. Very often, he quietly grounds the situation in ways that seduce us to prematurely anticipate, as poets sure of their footing can so engagingly do, before he takes the unexpected turn that leads to surprise, and in the best of these poems, genuine, often heartbreaking discovery.
—Gary Fincke, Author of Bringing Back the Bones: New and Selected Poems
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