How do we redefine the self when memory begins to deteriorate?

This question is at the heart of Ghost Work, a suite of poems that explores a son’s gradual loss of his father from dementia. In compassionate, well-crafted pantoums, triolets, ghazals, and sonnets, Rob Colman probes family connection, digging into the liminal space memory preserves between our natural and built environments. Ghost Work is at once a tribute to a lost family member, and a testament to the fragility of the human condition.

Robert Colman is a Newmarket, Ontario-based writer and editor. He has been involved in trade publications for the manufacturing industry for more than ten years. Colman is the author of three other full-length collections of poetry, Democratically Applied Machine (Palimpsest Press, 2020), Little Empires (Quattro Books 2012) and The Delicate Line (Exile Editions 2008). He received his MFA from UBC in 2016 and currently serves on the editorial board of PRISM International.

Robert Colman's profile page

Rob Colman’s Ghost Work is a slow dance with memory. A slow dance with memory as it crumbles, flees. A slow dance with pieces, and the heart begging one more chorus, one more verse, one more line, and the dance floor is a rising pool, and the pool is time.

Katie Fewster-Yan, author of Surrender & Resistance