Scratching the Ghost

Booth's debut collection, winner of the Cave Canem poetry prize, begins with a prayer: "When I die, beneath what will be/ left, the crust of Wednesday,/ be faithful to the cuts and carpet burns, scent of my feet." These lines initiate us into a collection that draws equally on prayer and past injury, sacred attention, and unholy substance. The book, whose title poem recalls with care the speaker's grandmother as she scratches at the ghost of her long-gone leg, anoints even its most violent considerations of the past with a measured lyric imagination. It proclaims the necessity of plumbing our origins, even as it admits the practice may estrange us from those origins: "I feel impaired/ by metaphors for loneliness," Booth writes, "%E2%80%A6the language we used to share is so peculiar/ now." It is a thoughtful first book by a poet who struggles to render into language his memory of how language and memory act on one another; it arrives, as many do, at the inevitability of the attempt: "What else could I have been/ looking for but passage? For the lips to probe for something more/ to witness than the body I praise, even as it fails?" (Dec.)