Poetry. "Graceful, tensile, and electric, IF YOU HAVE GHOSTS is a haunting and haunted book. John Pursley III's prodigious gifts for metaphor, imagery, and an elliptical narrative reminiscent of Larry Levis are amply displayed in this guide through liquid time. We encounter a fire that 'sounded like my mother snapping sheets / Onto the bed as they came out of the dryer,' Chet Baker's 'androgynous melody' that is 'like the false-front store / that never closes, & fools no one,' a lollipop dropped by a child in an airport that explodes 'in a confusion of ruby shards.' Empathetically felt, played out in a deeply nuanced syntax, these poems both reveal and complicate our troubled, troubling world"--Beth Ann Fennelly.

Author Hometown: GREENVILLE, SC USA



About the author: John Pursley III is the author of three previous chapbooks: Supposing, for Instance, Here in the Space-Time Continuum (Apprentice House Press, 2009), A Conventional Weather (New Michigan Press, 2007), and When, by the Titanic (Portlandia Press, 2006). He has won the Fugue Poetry Prize, the Southeast Review Poetry Prize, and was co-winner of the Sarah Lawrence College Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, among others. His poems have appeared in Agni, Colorado Review, Mississippi Review, and Poetry. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, and teaches creative writing and literature at Clemson University.