Accelerated by the Great Recession, late twentieth-century deindustrialization in the United States left many manufacturing cities, and their rural counterparts, economically battered by the experience of unprecedented joblessness, poverty, and depopulation. We characterize these locales as ghost towns, phantoms of a former glory, while often failing to acknowledge the people who fare the downturns and form the core of America’s urban and rural cultures.

The nine poets represented in American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry counter such myopia in verse, with thoughtful reflections on the real costs of industry and its dismantlement — community life, personal identity, cultural traditions, and the natural world — in Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin, and beyond. This intimate collection culls inspiration from personal and collective experience, found text, and oral history, as it speaks to the complicated humanity surviving amid so-called ruin. American Ghost asks us to consider: what will sustain us? How will we sustain each other?

Ithaca, NY: Stockport Flats, 2011 (ISBN 978-0-615-44807-7)

“The Answer is Not One, but Also Not Two”: Ghosts, Gods, and Humane Sustainability

March 10, 2010

Dear Lori,

Song is everywhere to be found, even in devastation — especially in devastation. A survivor of the earthquake kept alive by (among other things) singing to himself. Did you tell me that? You told me about the echoes of song coming from Egyptian tombs. And the singing in the camps after rescues. In any case, it sounds like something you would say. And it is beautiful.

The idea for this book began in a series of conversations about Detroit, Haiti, and humane sustainability, that is, how we can not only preserve our planet but also each other — our livelihoods, relationships, neighborhoods, identities and cultural traditions — after the industries around which so many communities have developed vanish. While looking squarely at the human cost of deindustrialization, however, the book encompasses many stories that have taken place across the country. This book doesn’t purport to be a book of answers in poetry. It does, however, hope to pose a few useful questions about what’s at stake. Here, revision seems an almost unimaginable task, yet imagination is precisely what’s called for. American Ghost is a love song to communities all over the country, and like any good love song it must reckon with heartbreak and failure as much as with hope. This book suggests that an attitude of seeking out sustenance—where, by all accounts, none should be found—is a necessary pursuit. — excerpt from the introduction