Description
‘From immigrants and settlers to slave owners and abolitionists, Katie Hale’s candid poems of portraiture constitute a necessary work of decoloniality and witness. By tracing the histories of women in her family, she offers a radical exploration of whiteness and its impact across the centuries that, “Let the body learn to witness its own skeletons”‘
Malika Booker
White Ghosts, the debut collection by poet and novelist Katie Hale, traces maternal lines, and the legacies of slavery and whiteness interwoven into the fabric of America, through revealing, unflinching poems. Travelling deep into an intimate history that spans both sides of the Atlantic, Hale unravels the language haunting those narratives we choose to tell in official versions – through museum labels and civic statues – and in handed-down stories.
‘This haunted, haunting book is unflinching in its confrontation of history, and what it means to own or be owned. Poems about whiteness are gradually erased and in this erasure reveal new, painful stories that examine the intersection between responsibility and guilt, between truth and omission’ Kim Moore
Katie Hale is an internationally recognised poet and novelist, who has held residencies and fellowships around the world. Her novel, My Name is Monster, has been translated into multiple languages, and her second pamphlet, Assembly Instructions, won the Munster Chapbook Prize. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, Hawthornden Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, and was awarded a 2021 Northern Debut Award for White Ghosts. She lives in Cumbria, where she also writes for theatre and immersive digital performance, and mentors emerging poets.
