Ghost Hour Review by Amanda Auerbach

Ghost Hour by Laura Cronk

Persea Books 

December 2020

Paperback $15.95

ISBN 978-0-89255-519-2 

104 pages 

The Poetics of Self-Removal in Laura Cronk’s Ghost Hour

In Laura Cronk’s Ghost Hour, the speaker examines her being and identity in juxtaposition to her ancestors’ being and identities. What makes the speaker feel ghostly is her awareness of participating in a mode of consciousness that exists independently of herself. As a ghost, the speaker acquires the ability to slip in and out of her own consciousness as she might slip into and out of the shirt dress on the collection’s cover.

The book is broken into three sections. The collection begins on a surreal, playful note with “Ancestry,” in which the speaker feels her ancestors jostling inside of her:

…………….I never know who is looking

…………….out from my eyes: sadistic German

…………….Catholic or silent Appalachian clockmaker.

…………….The sky is so blue today as I drag the neighbor

…………….boy to the bus, the onion farmer in me

…………….against the army vet in him. There’s the

…………….army vet in me, too. He gets things done,

…………….like taking my daughter and the neighbor,

…………….boys to the bus, even if one is having a tantrum.

The speaker feels herself being led through her day, as she leads her daughter and the neighbor boys to the bus, by these competing parts of herself, which each have their own personalities and preferences. The speaker’s interest in her ancestors gives way to a broader interest in elements of the cultural and personal past that predetermine her experience. 

Cronk’s collection does not shy away from the disturbing ghostliness it cultivates. The multi-section prose poem “Dear Autobiography” begins, “You had a knack for making a home wherever you were.” Though the poem will go on to describe innocuous arts and crafts strategies for home-making, this claim must be read in the context of the second poem, “Ancestry,” in which the speaker speculates that her grandfather might have marched with the Klan. The claim is further contextualized in “Before,” in which the speaker’s family avoids thinking about who owned their land before they did. This suggests that the talent for home-making amounts to a knack for colonizing and the psychological ability to adopt a convenient inherited perspective. 

The speaker is aware of how she, a white person, benefits from racism and colonialism. But the primary form of ghostliness she cultivates is not home-making, but the sense of being nowhere:

…………….As I took notes on the bald spots, the man next to me looked plainly into my lap trying to read as I …………….wrote. I looked just past him, out into the black distance of the window, willing him to stop. He …………….stopped. Where I’m at is that I only read and write on the train. I give myself this time when I’m …………….officially nowhere. Where I’m at is finding what’s possible without effort that anyone else could see. …………….And now in the marathon evening hours of getting a family to bed I’m out of hiding, typing, my son …………….on my lap. He’s going to add the final punctuation (“Dear Autobiography”)

When the man on the train stares into the speaker’s lap to see what she is writing, he makes her aware of her gendered relation to him, as a woman being stared “into” by a man. This consciousness is incompatible with writing. She can only write when she could just as well not be where she is or doing what she is doing. Her son can help with the punctuation because, unlike the man on the train, he does not understand or care about what she is writing. Her ability to write is the ability to slip out of her consciousness of her own effort and into the perspective of those who are indifferent to her activity. 

The second part of the collection is a single poem, “As Made,” which tells the story of the speaker’s high school relationship with a boy she later learns is gay. The poem raises the question, what is the ontological status of a relationship based on a false belief? Is it real? In explaining her boyfriend’s evangelical Christianity, the speaker claims,

…………………………..I know that you, though, …………….were expected

…………………………………………to let Jesus

……………………………………………………….all the way into your heart.

…………………………..I saw a Young Life brochure showing how.

…………………………………………Plan a night you could be alone,

…………………………..schedule a kind of date with him.

…………………………..Make a meal and
…………….set two places.

The date night joke with Jesus is on the speaker, who believes she is dating an ideal, straight man. The poem serves as a hinge between the collection’s first concern with inherited prejudices and its subsequent concern with culturally-scripted fantasies. 

The third part starts with poems that focus on experiences the speaker would have if she were or acted differently—if, for instance, she didn’t eat or if she were male and a priest. Taking her cue from media culture, the speaker aims to cultivate the sense of being glamorous or sexy. In this state, she comes as close as possible to the ghostliness of existing as a body without a soul. In “But What of Holding the Keys to Freedom,” “The thing is, I am a thing walking, / another nothing.” 

But when the speaker shifts to prose poems, she is able to move away from regarding her own physical body. She instead scans the environment as a kind of weather radar administering a “planetary fly-by” (“Weather Poem”). The goal is to search for a seductive object that renders the seduced “only half human being” (“Vegetarian Poem”). Love is envisioned as an experience of being seduced not by the other person as a person, but by what the lover offers, including his body and manner. Hence, in “On Choosing You,” “You realized your mistake and brought / bundles of sheets washed and folded tight, / platters of roast chicken, hand creams.”

To love is to be reduced to creaturely desire for hand cream or roast chicken, or for the rituals of a community. In “Garden of Earthly Delights”: 

…………….We fight in the street
…………….in front of our kids,
…………….we share a cab, we choose
…………….cantaloupes together
…………….at the fruit stand. 

Finally, in “What Poems Are,” writing a poem is the act of doing something that is interchangeable with almost any other generative quotidian activity: “It’s like sewing, / it’s like cooking, / it’s like painting, / it’s like talking.” To write a poem is to carry out an activity that to start is to set oneself going. To write a poem or to read these final poems is to submit to being enmeshed in a repetitive activity. It is to be seduced and to give up the capacity for selective engagement that distinguishes the ghost. 

In Cronk’s Ghost Hour, the point of choosing not to be fully present to one’s own consciousness is to achieve a more desirable state of being ghostly, critiquing whiteness, being in the past, being nowhere, or being loved. And then there is also the perspective of someone who has once chosen to give in to hunger, desire, and love. This collection asks, what does it mean to be something other than a person who inhabits her own perspective? Ghost Hour suggests that it is often better to be a ghost than a fully-present person; but it is best to be seduced. 

Amanda Auerbach is a poet and literary critic. Her book What Need Have We For Such as We was published in 2019 by C&R Press, and her work has also appeared in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Fence, and Conjunctions. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Catholic University in D.C.