Through a Small Ghost by Chelsea Dingman explores the difficulties of parenting and child loss through changing geopolitical lenses in Florida, Canada and Denmark. More specifically, the poems explore the hard questions that surround child-rearing and touch on topics like the sacrifices of body and country that women make for their families and the invisibility mothers sometimes feel after a childbirth. It also speaks about the ways in which both partners may process the trauma of infertility and still-birth differently as well as feelings of inequality in the relationship and how couples can heal from hurt without damaging their union.
Dingman is a Georgia Poetry Prize winner and the author of several other collections. Her first book, Thaw, was chosen to win the National Poetry Series. Dingman is also the author of the chapbook What Bodies Have I Moved and has won the Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, the Water-stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s Creative Writing Award for Poetry.
