Christina Pugh – författare

Finalist: 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Essays | March 6, 2025Ghosts and the Overplus is a celebration of lyric poetry in the twenty-first century and how lyric poetry incorporates the voices of our age as well as the poetic “ghosts” from the past. Acclaimed poet and award-winning teacher Christina Pugh is fascinated by how poems continually look backward into literary history. Her essays find new resonance in poets ranging from Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks to the poetry of the present. Some of these essays also consider the way that poetry interacts with the visual arts, dance, and the decision to live life as a nonconformist. This wide-ranging collection showcases the critical discussions around poetry that took place in America over the first two decades of our current millennium. Essay topics include poetic forms continually in migration, such as the sonnet; poetic borrowings across visual art and dance; and the idiosyncrasies of poets who lived their lives against the grain of literary celebrity and trend. What unites all of these essays is a drive to dig more deeply into the poetic word and act: to go beyond surface reading in order to reside longer with poems. In essays both discursive and personal, Pugh shows that poetry asks us to think differently—in a way that gathers feeling into the realm of thought, thereby opening the mysteries that reside in us and in the world around us.

Ghosts and the Overplus is a celebration of lyric poetry in the twenty-first century and how lyric poetry incorporates the voices of our age as well as the poetic “ghosts” from the past. Acclaimed poet and award-winning teacher Christina Pugh is fascinated by how poems continually look backward into literary history. Her essays find new resonance in poets ranging from Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks to the poetry of the present. Some of these essays also consider the way that poetry interacts with the visual arts, dance, and the decision to live life as a nonconformist. This wide-ranging collection showcases the critical discussions around poetry that took place in America over the first two decades of our current millennium. Essay topics include poetic forms continually in migration, such as the sonnet; poetic borrowings across visual art and dance; and the idiosyncrasies of poets who lived their lives against the grain of literary celebrity and trend. What unites all of these essays is a drive to dig more deeply into the poetic word and act: to go beyond surface reading in order to reside longer with poems. In essays both discursive and personal, Pugh shows that poetry asks us to think differently—in a way that gathers feeling into the realm of thought, thereby opening the mysteries that reside in us and in the world around us.

Complex and focused, this collection of poems moves along the line between waking and sleeping to reveal a narrator who is contemplating her origins as well as her future. Pugh frequently turns in her work to the image of a bed - as a source of comfort, an erotic landing, and a place for dreaming. For Pugh, dreams both obscure and reveal, their language a code to be analyzed, as in her longer meditation inspired by Freud's case history 'Dora'. After dipping dangerously far into dreams, Pugh's poems return to a world of activity, full of physicality before becoming calm. At the end of the book, the self is restored and can see the world through a newly formed lens taken from its dreams.

Christina Pugh's fifth book of poems explores the technologies both ancient and new that inhabit our contemporary cultural moment. Mapping an uncanny journey through the clusters of media we encounter daily but seldom stop to contemplate, Pugh's focused descriptions, contrasting linguistic textures, and acute poetic music become multifarious sources of beauty, disruption, humor, and hurt. Here, Netflix and YouTube share space with eighteenth-century paintings, Italian graffiti, ballet, Kurt Cobain's recordings, and even a collection of rocks. Whether technology is a vessel for joy or grief in these poems, it is always an expression of our continuing desire to invent and to mediate. At once personal archive and cultural barometer, Stardust Media traces the moving constellations of life in the distant twenty-first century, ""a kaleidoscope /... half-filled with sky-blue glass-cut blossoming, / then labored to crystallize.