Poetry Manuscript
Haintology: Poems and Visitations
Todd is currently working on a book of poems titled Haintology: Poems and Visitations. The manuscript draws from Jacques Derrida, Appalachian folklore, and the older, stranger language of haunting. It is also, more simply, a book about loss: the dead who remain and the voices that return whether called or not.
The time of the “learning to live,” a time without tutelary present, would amount to this, to which the exordium is leading us: to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly.Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
Poems from the Manuscript
“`The following poems are part of Haintology: Poems and Visitations and have appeared in journals and magazines.
Appalachian Journal: As the Crow Flies
A Late Night Frittata on Lancaster Street
A dead woman returns at 2:00 am with a simple request. The speaker opens the refrigerator and tries to answer.
Northern Appalachia Review
While At Eyecare Associates, My Dead Mother Walks In
Without his glasses, the speaker sees his dead mother across the waiting room. Then the new lenses arrive.
Friends Journal
The Silence of Rockford Chapel
At his first Quaker meeting, the speaker enters the silence with too many theories. Then the room begins to answer.