“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” wrote Walt Whitman. Poets H. L. Hix and Jonathan Weinert adopted Whitman’s declaration as a guiding principle for Ghost Smoke. In this “Song of Themself,” Hix and Weinert merge their voices to create a spirited book-length hybrid poem that meditates on distance, listening, finitude, and different kinds of love. Fabricated of material collected from over two decades of correspondence and collaboration, Ghost Smoke borrows the structure of a crown of sonnets, completing a circuit that seeks to defeat the standard distinctions between question and answer, presence and absence, self and other. Is it possible to find a language that can allow us to become more porous to one another, to listen more deeply to one another and to respond in kind? Can we become each other’s ghosts, open to and inhabited by one another? What happens to us, and what happens between us, if we do?
