The Marvelous Bones of Time

I just finished Brenda Coultas' The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explorations. There is nothing like this book. The first part is a long poem exploring slavery in Kentucky and Indiana, and the poet's voice makes this history very personal, intimate, strange. Heritage and national history distilled through the unique individual. The rest of the book is comprised of prose pieces about various ghosts stories and hauntings, and is written in a sparse poetic style that again is unique and intimate, layered.

The rest of the book seems haunted by the first part of the book. The way I understand paranormal stuff is that there is mythic misperception that we have about the solidity of our reality, and that other possibilities, other presents, are somehow there. This is true, always in our mind. In memory and dream and weird associations and feelings we have in our body, and these get tapped into sometimes with greater clarity. Or, as a poet Brenda quotes thinks about "consensus reality" - "about what we as a society agree is real, and his feeling was that there are other realities, which sometimes cross over into ours". It's like a bleeding or seeping.

Here's an excerpt from The Robert Investigations:

"He met a man who asked him if he were yelling 'Annabella' in a weird voice. The man, who was wearing white shoes and a shiny dark suit, said that it might be disturbing to other visitors. Robert said, 'No, I was yelling, "Brenda"' and he demonstrated. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Robert saw something move, so he turned his head, nothing there. When he turned back around the man had vanished. Later, he realized that the shoes were from the disco era."

I couldn't find an image of the book's cover, which is gorgeous, so I used this image of a photograph of "ectoplasm" that was on display at the Met a few years ago.