The Other Altar

Nicholas Gulig's third collection of poetry, The Other Altar, unearths a landscape where the experience of loss is both local and global, personal and political, here and far away. The speaker of these poems wanders in a world illumined at every turn by ghosts whose shape and form he hopes to language in a litany of books, one inside the other. Haunting these pages are the specter of a dead father and the racial violence of a specifically American time and place. Against this backdrop of abiding heartache, Gulig turns to those he loves and to whom he feels indebted-his wife and children, his friends, and to the ghosts of other writers, his literary ancestors-trusting that a language rooted beyond the borders of our collective isolation, a poetry formed upon the altar of other people, might guide the self in the direction of a reenchanted, less solitary experience of creation. The Other Altar is a book that struggles on every page to remind the reader that grief and grace are intertwined, that liberation is a path we walk together, hand in hand and heart to heart, a place we speak into existence when the distance between word and world dissolves.