Ghost Walk by Sarah Wragg

Ghost Walk by Sarah Wragg

Sarah Wragg's Ghost Walk leads the reader down shifting streets, pausing in places where nothing is quite what is seems. Away from the cozy fireside, the past oozes through walls and gardens, while shopkeepers and sailors, astronauts and explorers, flicker at the edges of plain sight. Even the breaks between the lines are haunted, and both life and death become unreliable memories. Don't look behind you

• Oz Hardwick

From a toy shop to a space ship, these poems abound with unlikely, resonant settings, the ghosts appearing in medieval nuns' habits or scrolling down their mobile phones. This collection is a meditation on history, the human imagination, and humanity exposed in all its greed and cruelty. It's also political - eco-politics, gendered iniquities, animal testing - all get examined under the lens of ghostly horror. And each is a story in a nutshell, often with a powerful kick at the end, and full of a multiplicity of characters. This is one phantasmagoria you won't want to miss

• Amina Alyal

Sarah Wragg has a fine eye for the no-ones that are there. The restless souls present range from highwaymen still shooting crazily into times they can't touch, to boys with poppies of blood spreading across their hungry chests. Her gaze is wry and compassionate: she sees as much to pity in overloaded horses as in a boy who had no idea of childhood; she revives her ghosts and their hard times for our fresh consideration. Individually the poems are carefully made chronicles of misfortune, hubris and bad luck. Together they send a sharp, not-quite-familiar, shiver through the warmest room, and leave you wondering if you've ever really been alone.

• Rebecca Bilkau