Grief, depression, and trauma do terrible things to the human body and spirit. The brain rebels callously against its vessel, leaving the wounded mind to wallow in the deepest pits of despair, perpetually refreshing pain and obsessively seeking out the recesses of scarred memories.

The speaker in Robbie Coburn’s Ghost Poetry (2024) is similarly broken. There seems to be a separation in the book between the body (‘you’) and the mind (‘I’). Indeed, there lurks a third identity throughout Coburn’s poetry: a melancholy spectre that haunts the poems, desperately trying to pull the splintered parts of the speaker back together, sanguinely intoning that ‘I will be the ghost that dreams of you’. Such fragmentations lead to a pained observance as the speaker watches helplessly as the body is subjected to self-mutilation and violence, comprehending sadly that ‘the surface / of that body / was unmistakably mine.’