Poetry; Chapbook
ISBN: 978-1-957746-08-1
From Gold, Ghosts: Alchemy Erasures is a three-part series of erasures from the 1958 text by Inez Hunt and Wanetta W. Draper, Ghost Trails to Ghost Towns.
From Gold, Ghosts: Alchemy Erasures engages with the themes of consumerism, ruin, and ghosts. The supernatural element of the manuscript may also be described as a purgatory on Earth, as the dead souls have not “gone on” to an afterlife; they’re stuck in their ruined hometown. Throughout the manuscript, God appears like a shadow to be avoided. The chapbook invites the reader into the story in the very first line with, “You haven’t really seen until you have seen our ghost towns.” Located in the American West at the time of the Colorado Gold Rush and the Transcontinental Railroad Era, these erasures speak as a warning against sins of the spirit and the wasteful properties of capitalism.
PRAISE FOR From Gold, Ghosts:
"In From Gold, Ghosts, Remi Recchia gives us an entrancing collage of syntax that becomes both the signature and the potential savior of loss, as his lines cope with but also make evocative leaps across ghostly gaps in the history. “With eyes/ to find a carved heart,” Recchia’s poetic attention produces a lode-like record of an unfinished forgetting. For all that time and greed has claimed, this book shows how the reach of lyric inquiry can still find new ways back." —Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away and Night Angler
REMI RECCHIA is a poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He has a Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing from Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. Two of his poems have been published on Poets.org as winning pieces for a 2019 and 2021 University & College Academy of American Poets Prize. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021).