Afterlives

Poetry. AFTERLIVES, or SEVILRETFA as the reversed lettering on the back cover presents it, is the third full-length collection by Micah Ballard. As with recent work, Ballard continues the precarious yet successful envisioning of the spirited haunts of his native Louisiana amidst the streets of his long adopted San Francisco. Moving freely through forms, from tight taut lines to easy swoops across the page, to a new embrace of short prose blocks, the serial architecture of AFTERLIVES invites the reader to enter or return at any time. Evocative and oftentimes esoteric, the poems are of a collaborative landscape where a forensics of writing traces the communal interplay between living and departed worlds.