Lay Ghost, a set of eight poems drawn from Nathaniel Mackey’s intertwined and continuous serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and “Mu,” epitomizes the roving, ruminative poetics that have continued to animate his “long song,” for nearly five decades. Lay Ghost’s band of sojourners persist in their restless travel, passing, in these poems, through such venues as Wrack Tavern, Mu, the Stick City Ashram, Zar, Rag City, Philadelphia, Lagos, and Scratch Point. Both the travelers and the poems offer fraught dispatches beset by memory, tenuous futurity, momentary impulse, and metaphysical wish, while weaving a sustained oneiric chorus surging with lyrical and mystical play.
Lay Ghost
