This book is continuing a tradition of Neo-Spiritualist literature in America where the poem is the means of divination. The poem is a map of a world where ghosts and unattributed thinkers and writers haunt and intrude and give signals to the world next to us. This is an occupation for all poets, the most secular to the most conceptual and the most experiential and spontaneous. If words appear in prose here in these pages, they are still the production of a New Spiritualist poet who feels the presences and wants to tell us about them.

Elizabeth Robinson's On Ghosts returns us to the haunted aura around words. Here, a crossing of genres—poetry, prose meditation, personal testimony—shows that language itself amounts to a gathering of ghosts. Robinson’s oblique lyricism beckons us toward a twilight zone where we become ‘witness to the unverifiable.’ This is writing as the highest form of bewitching.