Image 1 of 1
“Silas House is a southern institution, and his first collection of poetry is heartbreaking in all the best ways. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who loves the South more while continually working to understand its history and untangle its present.”
—Jason Isbell, Grammy-winning singer and songwriter
“An author I reliably depend on to represent our home with respect, beauty, and authenticity. I love the sense of pride that comes through in so many of these poems.”
—Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
“I never met a Kentuckian who wasn't either thinking about going home or actually going home: I’ve read that on more than one poster back home, and if you’re kin to the land and the people there, then, well, you know. But what I didn’t know until reading Silas House’s poems was just how that aching lonesome began, even in childhood as I, too, ‘was already grieving the passing of all I knew / and loved.’ Harder still is the solastalgia—that kind of homesickness while still at home—that grows as you grow up, or as he puts it, not homesickness but ‘timesickness,’ grieving a home lost to years as well as to floods, an Appalachia washed away by thoughtless development and acculturation alike. All These Ghosts then is a kind of elegy, but like any lament worth its salt, it’s equally praise song—to soup beans and cornbread, to barefooted nights loud with insects, to those who have carried us through all that loss, and—just as Silas has done for me though this joyful, tender collection—carry us still.”
—Nickole Brown, Fanny Says
“Early in Silas House’s poetry collection All These Ghosts, the landscape is set so beautifully, so skillfully, so convincingly, that I carried the Kentucky mountains and its people with me as I turned every consequent page, feeling the accumulation of love, and love’s losses, as if watching a wild onion grow, that ancient symbol of complicated but natural love. There is Wordsworthian eloquence in Silas House’s impressive and gorgeous poetry debut. What a gift to readers everywhere.”
—Kathleen Driskell, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2025–26 and author of Goat-Footed Gods: Poems
A timely and poignant poetry collection by acclaimed author and former Poet Laureate of Kentucky Silas House, including the poem read at Governor Andy Beshear’s 2023 inauguration.
Silas House is known throughout the South as a quintessential person of letters—a novelist, music journalist, environmental activist, columnist, and as the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky. His first full-length collection of poetry blends his Appalachian upbringing with his ongoing relation to the natural world. Poems of praise for community and the collective appear alongside others tinged with nostalgia and grief when House keenly observes the loss of rural America as he once knew it. Returning to his touchstone subjects, Silas recalls wild places, echoes stories from a lingering and living past, and explores an abiding connection to family, friends, and fellow artists.
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels: Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, The Coal Tattoo, Eli the Good, Same Sun Here, Southernmost, and Lark Ascending. He is a recipient of the 2023 Southern Book Prize, the 2023 Booklist Editors' Choice, two Nautilus Book Awards, the Duggins Prize (the largest award for LGBTQ writers in the nation), and many other honors, including being longlisted for the 2019 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2023 he became Poet Laureate of Kentucky and was a Grammy finalist for writing and producing the first country music video to feature a gay love story. In 2022 he served as a fiction judge for the National Book Awards. His writing has appeared recently in Time, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, Garden and Gun, and many other leading publications.
