Ghosthawk

Ghosthawk is a guidebook of imagination from grasslands to star fields to the weather of the poet’s body. Where’s home in the crises of ecological collapse and mortal illness? Where’s joy with constant pain, a future blurred by smoke? Carrying these questions, Matt Rader wrote down the names of the wildflowers he met in the mountains, canyons and woodlands of his home in the Okanagan Valley. These poems are what he learned, the directions as he can best describe them.

Prize(s): Short-listed Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (2022) 

"Many cultures have had names for seers like Matt Rader. Contemporary Western culture has none. This is the book of a man who has died more than once and who carries with him knowledge of the point where being’s blaze touches nothingness. A book of profound humility and intense vision."
–Jan Zwicky, author of Songs for Relinquishing the Earth

"Ghosthawk is a field guide to wildflowers, birds, marriage, feeling—the “sudden animal” entering the poet’s sightline. These astonishing poems tender the world’s fullness, heavy with each, alight with looking: mariposa lily, snowberry, yarrow, yellowthroat, a body in peril, jewels of rain. From the ghosthawk of the title “circling / the white arrow / of its body smaller / and smaller away” to a sequence of islanded couplets turning on a lonely offset rhyme, the poems render the nuances and forebodings of feeling, and a singular farewell. Oh, they crackle with keen noticing and the living, vibrant world, but there’s soul ache too. Mirages and vanishing. “Yes, you can hear / moonlight / shatter.” A haunting dissolution and nearly unbearable fragility lie at the heart of this collection. Yet it is distinguished by—and I find myself repaired by—its generous radiance. This is an exquisite book: soul rich with regret and wonder, magnifying."
–Geri Doran, author of Resin

"It’s honestly, no bullshit, one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Ghosthawk speaks to me on a profound level."
–Jordan Scott, author of I Talk Like A River