Your Father on the Train of Ghosts

Collaboration w/John Gallaher

BOA Editions, 2011

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.

Praise & Reviews

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts may be the first email renga, but it probably won’t be the last. The co-authors inhabit ‘a growing region, but there are others too, regions / and examples of regions,’ together with ‘rhubarb futures’ and ‘this child’s chalk drawing on the sidewalk / of a sea monster on a Tilt-a-Whirl.’ ‘We are free / for a limited time,’ one of them writes (we don’t know who wrote what), and that augurs a peculiarly American kind of happiness.”
—John Ashbery

“This ample and sometimes witty collaboration between up-and-coming poet Waldrep and up-and-coming poet, critic, and blogger Gallaher could get attention for its unusual methods.”
Publishers Weekly

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is an extensive, joint undertaking developed over the period of a year from an email correspondence between two of the finest younger American poets writing today….[W]hat is more interesting than charting their differences is seeing these two poets lose their individual voices as the boundaries between them fracture, widening into yet another distinct voice—a third voice, dissimilar from either of their own, which operates like the ghosts suggested by the title; a voice that is as profound as it is endearing, as familiar as it is confiding.”
Diagram Magazine

“This is not a typical collaboration. It is not a book of exquisite corpse poems or turn-based Mad Libs. It is also not a G.C. Waldrep or a John Gallaher book; rather, a hybrid speaker emerges wearing Waldrep’s hat and Gallaher’s sneakers.”
Sycamore Review

“In a sweeping 200-plus poem collection, G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher tackle an undeniably complicated, expansive subject: this American life. Written collaboratively between a year of back-and-forth emails, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts slips fluidly from topic to topic, from the interior of a house (‘…and what do we have to show for it / around the dinner table, or the sound like a dinner table’), to the exterior: parkways and botanical gardens, chapels and hospitals. In Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, the ghosts take on a variety of forms, even the shape of two alternative speakers that occasionally slip into the mix, compounding the strength of the ‘narrator.’ These voices tap into a tender energy that often comes off haunting and residual, almost after-the-fact. As readers, we are asked to emotionally reflect on what stays and what most deeply remains: ‘Our parents, / for instance. We want them / where we can see them, hands up, teeth out. / We want them to remain where they are.’”
Newcity Lit