Its Ghostly Workshop Searches for Truth across Time and Place

“Intellectual travelogue merges with literary tour in these intricate creations and re-creations.”—Betty Adcock, author of Intervale: New and Selected Poems 

“A compelling convergence of the near and the far, Its Ghostly Workshop offers a version of the particular that yields a haunting enormity, and a glimpse of coherence amid our machinations and lush debris.”—Scott Cairns, author of Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected

From the Mediterranean to the American West, the poems in Ron Smith’s new collection move across time and place to seek reliable truths through personal observation. Beyond his own experiences Smith draws from the lives of notable and diverse figures—Edward Teller, Edgar Allan Poe, Mickey Mantle, Ezra Pound, Robert Penn Warren, Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl, and many others.

Its Ghostly Workshop probes the fallibility of philosophy while strengthening the quest for certainty. Wondering and weighing, these are poems capable of conviction as well as doubt. Like the city of Rome, the subject at the book’s center, Its Ghostly Workshop aims to rewire us, to “virus” us, to “rush” us “with visionary blazes, cascades / of memory, incandescent logic.”

Ron Smith, author of the poetry collections Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery and Moon Road, is the poetry editor for Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature. Winner of the Carole Weinstein Prize and other poetry awards, he holds the George Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching and serves as Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia. He is also Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Richmond.

March 11, 2013
88 pages, 6 x 9
978-0-8071-5030-6
Paper $16.95
LSU Press Paperback Original