The Ghost Won’t Go
December 8, 2026
Walt Whitman wrote that “the mere fact, consciousness”—the very awareness of being a thinking thing with sensations—so awed and pleased him that he could hardly move beyond that initial astonishment. In his fourth book of poems, Chris Forhan lingers in that place of amazement, finding in it bemusement, an occasional flicker of terror, and joy
| Hardcover | ISBN 9781639822461 | $36.00 |
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Walt Whitman wrote that “the mere fact, consciousness”—the very awareness of being a thinking thing with sensations—so awed and pleased him that he could hardly move beyond that initial astonishment. In his fourth book of poems, Chris Forhan lingers in that place of amazement, finding in it bemusement, an occasional flicker of terror, and joy.
The Ghost Won’t Go meditates upon the ghosts that inhabit a consciousness: the memories and imaginings, the griefs and yearnings, the random encounters with hailstorms, herons, fairy tales, and pop songs that, as the self develops, become indistinguishable from that self. These are poems about an old song you have forgotten and then suddenly find yourself humming. They are about that cloud that might as well have drifted into the sky out of a memory from decades ago. They are about a passion for someone and the doubting of that passion, for who knows where it comes from?
The poems also contemplate what is beyond consciousness: the eternal, the ground of nonbeing, the blankness upon which we write our lives and may yet return to. They yearn for an experience of “the present / without a past.” They are haunted by what Emily Dickinson “could not see to see” and by “the nothing” beheld by Wallace Stevens’s snowman. Amid the continuing riddle of human experience, they conclude that everywhere are things “worthy / of wonder,” not the least of which are the vicissitudes and riches of love.
What Others Are Saying
In “Against Transcendence,” Chris Forhan confesses “Beyondness exhausts me.” And yet in the titular poem of this, his latest searching and ebullient collection, the poet cannot help but embrace “something / unwittingly sacred” that renders the difficult, ephemeral, and often painful world “worthy / of wonder” in the midst of its dazzling ordinariness, its surprisingly un-funereal and veritable presence. Though we live in a time when all the links appear both metaphorically and literally unable to link us to “the other,” for Forhan God nonetheless remains “stuck with us.” In view of everything—failures of love, the inevitable body in the box—his imagination ranges even from the Slurpee cups of childhood unto the ever-expanding galaxies. All in all, the poems of The Ghost Won’t Go do believe in “The Big Thing,” and they are worthy of it.
Daniel Tobin, author of Dusk, Empire: New and Selected Poems
With searing simplicity, Chris Forhan writes, “I sang and sang / of love but failed to love enough.” The Ghost Won’t Go is haunted by love, by irony’s incredulous understanding, and by memory that has great sympathy for the past, even while it remains always anti-nostalgic. These beautifully vulnerable poems often turn and return to childhood. They reconfigure it as a source of rejuvenation, primal simplicity, imagination, and self-knowledge. The ten-year-old self sees “the backyard maple, / limbs lifting / in a gust, it was / a leaping beast / that would have me, grasping, / and oh, I said, oh.” These poems lament and rejoice. Oh, they say to all of a life’s loves and mysteries, and again, oh.
Donald Platt, author of Swansdown and Tender Voyeur
In The Ghost Won’t Go, Chris Forhan combines the whimsy, the quirks and turns, and the linguistic playfulness of Wallace Stevens with the seriousness and rich musicality of Keats, all the while maintaining a striking originality and contemporaneity. I can’t think of any poet writing today who is as lyrical or as attuned to the nuances of tone and voice. Forhan explores the disasters and the small but meaningful redemptive moments in romantic and familial love; the nuanced confusions of childhood; the pain and inevitability of loss; and his own refusal to embrace transcendence even as he achieves it through language, if only for the duration of the song. The poems demonstrate his characteristic lightness and buoyancy, creating a dynamic lyric friction with the seriousness of his subjects. These are powerful, deeply felt poems by an essential poet.
Morri Creech, author of The Sentence
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