Description

Tenement Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 31, 2024

Publisher Marketing:

The fourteenth entry in Tenements Yellowjacket series, a rough-hewed dreamscape of haunted ideas, ideations, & iterative ideograms from the poet, author, & librarian. A broken bibliography of facts, phantasy, and wyrd / weird arts & practices.

Radically exciting, this text has Beckett and Shakespeare, and all of Poes possibilities. As would Derrida, Dreamt by Ghosts leads you toward more and more In no way can I sum up how remarkable is this ghostly manuscript, and how delighted and in fact privileged I am to have been able to read it, with all its illuminated pauses and twists.

Mary Ann Caws

An act of autobiographical digression defying easy categorisation, Chris McCabesDreamt by Ghostsis a fractal work of hauntology that, at its core, owes to a journal written between the Spring of 2020 and the Summer months of 2023. What begins its life as a porous pillow booka private meditation on dreamsswiftly devolves to let its own organisational structure slide and glide to inform, instead, a facsimile document of strange coincidences, conniptions, and connivances to refract and reject a moment of enforced isolation. A singular, personal anthology of the wyrd and weirdof ghosts, of place, and of fractured perceptionDreamt by Ghostsmaps and charters a perspectival prison-break in times of trouble.

Here, weve a paean to peopleto strangersand to the subaltern and subterranean life of the associative eye, the meandering I. To the verge and border of genre, to the ever-eerie idea of a cityscape. From a silent London to the backstreets of Liverpool (be they remembered, revised, or revisited)documenting the loss of poets, the perseverance of family, and the joy and jouissance of friendship and fraternitythis elegiac collation of McCabes ephemera and poetry exacts itself as an examination of the ever-percolating idea. How the shape and length of a blank notebook is tilled to become a canvas for the dynamism of our diurnal lives.

Weve imagined and citational cameo from Fassbinder, from Mark E. Smithfrom Chika Sagawa, John Cale, and a myriad morein a volume interspersed with new poetry, distractions and diversionstypewritten visual poemsand concentrated, coincident-rich, essayistic excoriations of our cultural moment. McCabesGhostsis an effort to socialise the interior life, to take the wits for a walk, and all to defy the idea and determinism of our journeying toward any pre-set intellectual destination.