SUITES OF SORROW: A REVIEW OF GREATER GHOSTS BY CHRISTIAN J. COLLIER
In Greater Ghosts, poet Christian J. Collier locates haunting beauty and piercing truth in the wake of deep devastation. As the collection takes a meandering path through several narratives of loss and lament, he portrays the present, still-here nature of grief while simultaneously portraying a deepened perspective that time has permitted him to develop with respect to his losses. It’s the incisive perspective of a scientist who has examined that which is close under a microscope, that which is far through a telescope. Insisting on there being something there that admits observation and analysis. In so doing, he chooses words and phrases that find transparency in obscurity, power in vulnerability, earthiness in the mystical, and universality in particularity.
In his renderings, wounds become black pools whose tides will climb to dye your palm with grief. Grief, a splintered wooden raft, rollicking always under the growling storms. The past, a blacklit ballroom we wade into from different sides of an ebony curtain. He, a stone mausoleum wearing those unable to breathe with him. His name, a blue note lanterning his loves’ voices from time to time. His body, a means to sate someone else’s need to be fed. Other bodies, trapdoors to escape our own. Our souls, shelter for the ones we love. God, a great and swollen orange storm.
I had the pleasure of sitting down and speaking with the author last week. Of his writing process, Collier told me the following:
I had been familiar with the visual artist Mark Bradford [for a while]. I was looking at some of his process videos on YouTube, just watching him build up these elaborate pieces, adding layer after layer, and then break out power tools and start stripping layers away, and you start seeing the guts and everything underneath it. And something just clicked in my head— “What would it look like if I were to apply this same action and logic to text?” As soon as I thought that, all the doors opened. It completely changed the way I go about composing poems. I'm no longer interested in “All right, this is going to be the poem, and I'm just going to wrangle this thing into [existence].” No. I'm just interested in gathering interesting texts, and I just start moving things around and trying to build interesting connections. And after a while, then I allow my internal editor to come in and start applying pressure, to push the narrative along and interrogate what’s there.
The beauty of that is when I finish a poem, I’m inherently surprised by what’s there because it did not come from a place of intention. I just stretched out, working towards this theme of what a ghost is. Everyday was a surprise. Every week I was getting a poem, for a long time, and some weeks I was getting two. It’s never been like that since, I’m not sure if it’ll ever be like that again, but most of those poems ended up in the collection.
I've been saying that it’s kind of a “choose your own adventure” book where you can read from start to finish as one cohesive narrative, or you can read it as being at least four different narratives. Everybody has their own experience with it.
Readers will certainly pick up on the interplay of these different griefs within the collection. I experienced this similarly to how I experience a musical suite, or a concept album, with an overarching theme and several smaller motifs that ebb and flow throughout the various movements or tracks. There’s the motif of the loss of loved ones—loss to illness, loss to violence—composed of notes of longing and remembrance. There’s the motif of the taking of Black life, hauntingly highlighted by a “Benediction for the Black & Young.”
And there’s the miscarriage motif. It begins with “Alchemy” (Did you feel it // when each aging inch of us became a harbinger of new life). It continues with “Dead Time.” “God.” “Case Study” (what becomes of two poisoned creatures when their future, each sage green branch of it, has died back). “Submission” (I am the maker of a cerulean light not meant for life). And finally, the devastatingly intimate “First Time After.”
I asked Christian what role the writing of these poems played in his process of grieving these different experiences. He answered:
I don’t think the writing did anything [for my grieving process], mainly because enough time had passed between the events that served as the catalyst for the poems and the writing of the poems. I think that's really important because I think it's easy, if you've not fully interrogated something, to still write from a place where you're actively in it. I think it’s hard to see [the experiences] in different ways if you're still in that place.
My cousin was murdered at the end of 2014. The first couple of poems for the book were “Beloved” and “In His Place,” the latter of which directly brings my cousin into the work. But that was written five years after his passing. There was enough distance to turn it around, see it from different angles, explore different things. I think that’s the case with the other experiences that appear in the book.
I’m always trying to figure out a less common way into the subject. That’s one of the beauties of time—that you have the ability to wade in and see something from a different perspective. That work of interrogation came from enough time passing, as well as my growth as a person.
Even if I’m distorting something—I’ve distorted a couple of things in there that happened—it allows me to be more honest and get into the guts of the thing. The book is a testament to the beginnings of that process.
I certainly found this collection to deal poignantly, and generatively, with the inevitable interplay of distortion and purification, crystallization and obfuscation, selection and deselection, that comes with responding to personal experiences through art. And throughout it all, there is indeed an honesty and transparency that will move the reader deeper into and through their own sorrows.
Christian J. Collier
Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal.
