Your Father on the Train of Ghosts in Bloomington, MN

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts
is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third "voice" emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own.
The poems of
read as lyric snapshots of a culture we are all too familiar with, even as it slips from us: malls and supermarkets, museums and parades, toxic waste and cheesecakes, ghosts and fire, fathers and sons. Ultimately, these fables and confessions constitute a sort of gentle apocalypse, a user-friendly self-help manual for the end of time.
G.C. Waldrep
is author of
Goldbeater's Skin
(2003 Colorado Prize for poetry),
Disclamor
, and
Archicembalo
(2008 Dorset Prize). He has won awards from the Poetry Society of America and Academy of American Poets, fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony; and an NEA fellowship. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at Bucknell University.
John Gallaher
Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls
,
The Little Book of Guesses
(Levis Poetry Prize), and
Map of the Folded World
. His poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry series and numerous journals and anthologies. He co-edits
The Laurel Review
, GreenTower Press, and the Akron Series of Contemporary Poetics. He teaches at Northwest Missouri State University.