i’m not ghosting you
Contributors
Description
i'm not ghosting you is a bricolage of poetry, prose, and photography that attempts to explore the notion of ghosts in our lives in its various permutations, some of which manifest more clearly (when someone ghosts you by disappearing from your life) and others much less so (how even when someone has ghosted you, their ghosts remain to haunt you, often in ways that you might not even realise, that only occasionally flicker, often at the most unexpected of moments ... as traces to be read).
It is also an attempt to meditate through fiction; for, one can never approach ghosts directly. And, where a medium is usually what is needed.
Which also means we are always attempting to reach what is innermost in us through translation, and in translation. Where what we consider our most familiar, our haunts at which we hang out with friends, might also be what is most unfamiliar, and un-familial, to us, what occasionally even spooks us, is uncanny in its familiar-unfamiliarity; but also something - a place, a space, a memory - from which we can never really get away.
…
i'm not ghosting you is a collection where the ‘me’ and the ‘I’ telling it are not only not necessarily always the same, but sometimes appear strange to, estranged from, each other. This is quite possibly why song lyrics play such a crucial role in this tale, even as they seem to be 'mere asides'. For, songs and music often make their way into us in ways we remain blind to; where we discover (sometimes as a shock, even as a rude awakening) that we know the lyrics to a tune we never thought we'd like, that we never even really knew we know ... they inscribe themselves into us in white ink, occasionally allowing us to catch a glimpse of them, but perhaps always playing on our B-sides — maybe haunting, maybe even nurturing us — in the background of ourselves.
Back cover blurb
We all know modern life is a séance and this brilliant text - tender, mercurial, profound - plays hide-and-seek and forget-me-not in a series of erasures, evasions, and disappearances. It's a grand meditation that forms an otherworld of associations, juxtapositions, and tones. We're carried along on a frequency composed of song lyrics, Morse code, archaic punctuation marks, and quotations. Voices drift in and out like late-night transistor radio in a black-and-white movie. The I narrating is me and you and the space between us. We are the haunting and the haunted longing for something and moving between secret (after)lives. Ghosts are a state of being.
~ Nate Lippens