Ghostlit: Poems

by Theodora Ziolkowski

Overview

Intimate, urgent, and relentlessly inventive, the poems in Ghostlit reflect upon mythology and feminist pop culture and contemporary ideology as they may become embedded in the psyches and even the bodies of their inheritors. Through visceral and sometimes gothic-inspired images, mythological allusions, and the assemblage of strands of narrative, the poems in this collection chart the ways in which manipulative emotional strategies on individual and cultural levels inflict lingering harm upon minds and bodies. Throughout, the poems peel back the layers of what it means for an abuse survivor to reclaim a sense of self—long after the damage has been done. “It turns out that the years I believed myself lucky/were partly responsible for my thinking/there was something deeply wrong with me” could be understood as a refrain for the speaker in Ghostlit or as a shorthand for a cautionary tale about how many survivors may be encouraged to deny the reality of abuse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680034103
Publisher:	TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication date:	03/10/2025
Series:	21st Century Poets , #34
Edition description:	1
Pages:	78
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

THEODORA ZIOLKOWSKI is the author of the novella, On the Rocks, winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Prairie Schooner, no tokens, Oxford Poetry (UK), and Short Fiction (England), among others. She teaches creative writing as an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Table of Contents

I
Immediately after we wed, I saw a snake / 3
At the memory care center, the residents don’t want to make Valentines / 5
Before I became the wife, I’d get down on my haunches / 6
Picture this: you wear girl-sized clothes the summer / 7
Having returned from a trip, I found the lake / 8
For days, the sunflowers watch me / 10
Eurydice, the seamstress who laced me / 11
Once, we saw barn swallows fucking, & the pendulum sweep / 12
Though I always took Plan B before we had a chance for a baby / 13
Our apartment still aromatic with the trout lily / 14
II
It turns out that the years I believed myself lucky / 17
I got used to church bells & sun showers / 22
Leaving Vatican City, I was packed shoulder to shoulder / 23
When we were making our descent, some rock rolled into my path / 25
The wife could not open her mouth to justify herself / 26
It was on a balcony over the Mediterranean that I found myself slurping the bodies / 27
In the dream in which I refuse to repair us / 30
The best part of a descent is looking up / 31
Lying in the hospital bed, I wonder why every song I love / 32
III
I was five & running errands with my mother / 39
That morning, he kept his distance: blackout curtains, no breakfast / 40
Every summer, you read Middlemarch but never make it past the middle / 42
Recently, there has been an infestation of crows / 43
At the memory care center, the parlor resembles / 45
It’s late, your cat is clawing the backseat, & you’re afraid your husband will nod off / 47
From NPR, the wife learns of the hog problem in Texas / 48
On the phone, Mom says the deer population continues / 52
In the horror story of my invention, it is the wife’s unfocused gaze / 53
IV
At least I feel something, I think, as I run the same route I took / 57
“Do Not Touch Without Assistance” reads the sign at the antique store / 58
In Sleeping with the Enemy, Julia Roberts plays a woman whose new life / 59
There is a fact of memory & there is a fact of feeling / 61
I love watching Irish step dancers, their feet tapping / 63
When I realize what to call it, I ask my therapist / 64
While online dating, Eurydice adds “black trumpet mushrooms” / 67
At the memory care center, the waters are calm before they are choppy / 68
During the tropical storm, my hands scrabbled / 70
Lying on the patient table—gel on the wand / 71
Acknowledgments / 73

Editorial Reviews

A spellbinding, liminal, and unflinching collection, Theodora Ziolkowski’s Ghostlit interweaves themes of memory, myth, identity, trauma, and absence. These superbly crafted poems operate like a triple-fugue offering whose fractured narrator sifts through lost worlds and shifts of consciousness to mend the heroine’s splintered soul. Astounding, visceral, and, at heart, poignant.”
—Hélène Cardona

Hélène Cardona

In Ghostlit, Theodora Ziolkowski considers a history of emotional abuse and trauma through the transformative lens of memory. Here, the degradation and pain of a past marriage erupt into the present, just as the knowledge of the present circles the past, always refiguring it, always trying to understand. Ziolkowski is a master of tight narrative, of gothic energy, of intense psychological insight. Reading Ghostlit is like inhabiting a brilliant mind—a mind that, for all this, never fails to be interesting, to be complex, and to be powerful.”
—Kevin Prufer

Kevin Prufer

The poems of Theodora Ziolkowski’s Ghostlit ripple with such self-assured strength that it is impossible not to feel stronger and more resolute for having read them. Humming with myth and memory, Ziolkowski laces lines with chiffon and sunflower petals, carves and crafts these poems toward an exhilarating freedom. Ziolkowski writes, ‘Pompeii was destroyed because of the direction the wind was blowing.’ And isn’t that the truth. But as often as the wind brings destruction, it carries you from it. Allow these poems to be the wind that carries you to safety and a new softness.”
—Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Theodora Ziolkowski’s poems glow with the ghosts of past selves. From the unhappy wife to the woman abroad questing desire amidst the burning Notre Dame Cathedral, the speaker breaks her desire free from the leash of marriage and yearns for a new life that doesn’t begin in lies. Alive with longing and introspection, Ziolkowski’s poems bring bright relief to the speaker’s mind and make room for a ‘woman to rescue herself from the mundanity of the indoors.’ From stubborn and messy selves, her ghosts charge into definition by souring the past with fresh eyes. Ghostlit is a haunting and astonishing collection that shimmers with love for the salt and flesh of desire.”
—Sebastián H. Páramo, author of Portrait of Us Burning

Sebastián H. Páramo

The poems of Theodora Ziolkowski’s Ghostlit ripple with such self-assured strength that it is impossible not to feel stronger and more resolute for having read them. Humming with myth and memory, Ziolkowski laces lines with chiffon and sunflower petals, carves and crafts these poems toward an exhilarating freedom. Ziolkowski writes, ‘Pompeii was destroyed because of the direction the wind was blowing.’ And isn’t that the truth. But as often as the wind brings destruction, it carries you from it. Allow these poems to be the wind that carries you to safety and a new softness.”—Kayleb Rae Candrilli

From the Publisher