Nationally acclaimed, award-winning Essex poet Christopher Locke will read from his new collection of poems MUSIC FOR GHOSTS on Tuesday, May 31 at 7:00 pm at Whitcomb’s. Light refreshments served. Free and open to the public.

 PRAISE for MUSIC FOR GHOSTS:

“This book gets to me the way a great opera does or a noir movie. Often eerie, always fierce and intense, it reminds us that death and the loss of love are never far away. But as one poem says, we lose ourselves in what saves us. In work as savvy as it is elegant, Christopher Locke shows us a blaze burning brightly among the shadows. It is the fire of art, and it is there that we warm our hands.”

--David Kirby, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University

 “Christopher Locke's stunning collection Music for Ghosts paints a landscape inhabited by voices "wounded by the curse of dumb choices", where "God fills the clouds with his absence," and even "dusk presses the windows until they bruise." Locke's poems--tender amid the grit--seek salvation and absolution as antidote to the frailties of the human condition, with a yearning both gorgeous and universal.”

—Tina Cane, Poet Laureate of Rhode Island and author of Body of Work and Year of the Murder Hornet.

Christopher Locke was born in New Hampshire and received his MFA from Goddard College. His poems have appeared in, among others, The North American Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Poetry East, Verse Daily, Southwest Review, The Literary Review, The Sun, West Branch, Rattle, 32 Poems, Rhino, Saranac Review, The Southeast Review, Spillway, and The Adirondack Review. He won the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, as well as grants in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. 25 Trumbulls Road, his first collection of fiction, won the Black River Chapbook Award. His new book of poems is Music For Ghosts(NYQ Books). His memoir, Without Saints (Black Lawrence Press), is out this October. Chris lives in Essex and teaches English and creative writing at SUNY Plattsburgh and North Country Community College.