White Nightgown. Megan Gannon

From the ruins of ocean liners and model cities, to the dark impulses of Greek myths and biblical narratives, poet Megan Gannon casts a wide thematic net in tracing the legacy of desire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With the lyric compression of Emily Dickinson, the syntactical momentum and surrealist imagery of Sylvia Plath, the poems in White Nightgown examine how desire serves as both a creative and a destructive force, drawing loved ones near to us and pushing them away, destroying nations as well as shaping them. In Gannon's poems, the vestiges of desire are as encompassing as water, as enduring and semi-visible as ghosts.