This selection, chosen by guest editor Amber Alexander, is from Naming the Ghost by Emily Hockaday, released by Cornerstone Press in 2022.
The Ghost Has Started Reading
The ghost has started reading to our daughter in the night. We find books like I’ll Love You Forever and Runaway Bunny open and stacked next to her crib. These are the books I can never get through; icicles from childhood that lodged between my ribs and still, in adulthood, haven’t melted. The ghost doesn’t perceive temperature. I look in my daughter’s eyes for signs of frozen shards. When she laughs, is it quieter? She squirms from my scrutiny with narrow eyes. Don’t you have the story wrong? I ask. I write a response in the bathroom mirror: It isn’t always about you.
Emily Hockaday’s second collection, In a Body, is forthcoming with Harbor Editions October 2023. Her first full-length, Naming the Ghost, debuted with Cornerstone Press in September 2022. She is the author of six poetry chapbooks, and her poems have appeared in print and online journals, as well as with the Poets of Queens and Parks & Points’ Wayfinding anthologies. Emily writes about ecology, parenthood, chronic illness, grief, and the urban environment.
Amber Alexander, who publishes creative work as e. holloway, is a poet based in Ohio. They currently work in higher education and as an Assistant Editor for Best Of The Net within Sundress Publications. Alexander is a former Editorial Intern for Sundress Publications, former Editorial Board Member for Cornfield Review, and was a Sundress Academy for The Arts Writing Resident in 2023. Their work has been published by Cornfield Review and earned multiple awards during undergrad at The Ohio State University.
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: tether & lung by Kimberly Ann Priest - October 9, 2026
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: tether & lung by Kimberly Ann Priest - October 8, 2026
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: tether & lung by Kimberly Ann Priest - October 7, 2026