Poetry

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), 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 a 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.

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About the Author

G.C. Waldrep

G.C. Waldrep’s many books of poetry include: Testament (BOA, 2015); Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA, 2011), a collaboration with John Gallaher; and Disclamor (BOA, 2007). Waldrep has received prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Colorado Prize, the Dorset Prize, the Campbell Corner Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing, and a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Waldrep teaches at Bucknell University, is Editor for the literary journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

John Gallaher

John Gallaher is the author of Brand New Spacesuit (BOA Editions, 2020), In A Landscape (BOA, 2014), and The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), which received the Levis Poetry Prize. He is also the co-author with G.C. Waldrep of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA, 2011), which was written in collaboration almost entirely through email. He is currently the co-editor of The Laurel Review and The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. He lives in Marysville, Missouri, where he is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University.