The Seventh Town of Ghosts

Praise for The Seventh Town of Ghosts and Faith Arkorful

Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Finalist
Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Shortlist
Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Shortlist

“Navigating The Seventh Town of Ghosts, one can’t help but come away in awe of such a powerful and moving lyric voice. Here in its pages, we find grief, longing, and the will to survive embodied and tangibly real. Even in the wake of police violence, state injustice and betrayal, the speaker’s voice determinedly and profoundly carries us forward beneath the blanket of stars, haunted by the memories of people and places no longer here or left far behind. In a world that threatens to erase and diminish, these poems burn with so much life, movement, and incandescent beauty.” —2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Jury

“The Seventh Town of Ghosts by Faith Arkorful is a reckoning in slow circles around family, forgiveness and the fundamental question of how to weigh a life. The collection artfully evolves intimate relationships and a deepening selfhood across a lifetime of revisited landscapes, shaped, in part, by startling, unexpected metaphoric turns on the sinister trickstering of state, police and other every-day violence and violation. Fully sensorial, earth-grounded and suffused with spirit, The Seventh Town of Ghosts meticulously etches a path of survival from origin to acceptance, laced with measures of hope held in delicate balance.” —2025 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Jury

“Faith Arkorful’s poems are full of living. Despite, because of, on the edge of, in and through the body, history, grief and tenderness, The Seventh Town of Ghosts is heartfelt music here. And magic.” —Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

“The Seventh Town of Ghosts invites us into an intimacy of collisions, siblings, stars, saltwater, citrus fruit, and blood, as well as the threat of enforcement, erasure, and all ‘the prerequisites of violence.’ Arkorful’s voice is lucent and uncompromising as she charts and queries both her relations and selfhood in poems that are at once as fulsome as ‘a blanket of stars [and] delicate as a spider’s web.’ This is a work I will return to for both its interrogation and celebration of the beauty and necessity of haunting.” —Liz Howard, author of Letters in a Bruised Cosmos

“Insistently lyrical (‘I AM NOBODY ELSE BUT MY OWN BECOMING’), The Seventh Town of Ghosts sings flesh and hauntings, asphalt and saltwater, earthworms and mathematics—sings the urgency, amidst enveloping noise, of bravest existential clarity: ‘I have no answers, only small honesties.’ Faith Arkorful is the poet we need, with fierce new philosophies, and a tongue for ‘both the acid and sweetness.’” —David Chariandy, author of Brother