Your Father on the Train of Ghosts

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third voice emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own.

The poems of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts read as lyric snapshots of a culture we are all too familiar with, even as it slips from us: malls and supermarkets, museums and parades, toxic waste and cheesecakes, ghosts and fire, fathers and sons. Ultimately, these fables and confessions constitute a sort of gentle apocalypse, a user-friendly self-help manual for the end of time.

G.C. Waldrep is author of Goldbeater's Skin (2003 Colorado Prize for poetry), Disclamor, and Archicembalo (2008 Dorset Prize). He has won awards from the Poetry Society of America and Academy of American Poets, fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony; and an NEA fellowship. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at Bucknell University.

John Gallaher is author of Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls, The Little Book of Guesses (Levis Poetry Prize), and Map of the Folded World. His poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry series and numerous journals and anthologies. He co-edits The Laurel Review, GreenTower Press, and the Akron Series of Contemporary Poetics. He teaches at Northwest Missouri State University.

G.C. Waldrep: G.C. Waldrep is the author of three previous full-length collections of poems, Goldbeater's Skin (winner of the 2003 Colorado Prize), Disclamor (BOA, 2007) and Archicembalo (winner of the 2008 Dorset Prize), as well as three chapbooks, most recently "St. Laszlo Hotel" (Projective Industries, 2010). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, and Tin House, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. His work has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets, the Campbell Corner Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He has held fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and elsewhere. He was a 2007 Literature Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. Waldrep earned a Ph.D. in American history from Duke University and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. He also serves as Editor-at-Large for the Kenyon Review.