Favored ghosts, recommended goblins

The spooky season is upon us, but it won't last for long. Before the jack-o-lanterns start rotting on the front porch and while the pre-Halloween candy is still stuck in your teeth (talkin' to you, Claude Levi-Strauss!), enjoy some poetry with a spectral presence. The New York Times recommends six ghoulish collections, among them Nathalie Handal's spooky, saucy collection, Love and Strange Horses:

As I read “Love and Strange Horses” — a book that trembles with belonging (and longing) and love and sex — I almost felt as if I were cheating on my wife. In her furious and feverish poems Ms. Handal knows a kiss can be “like water slapping against bare feet,” knows “the jealousy of raindrops on the umbrella of lovers,” knows some lovers ask too much (on their way to becoming erotic specters): “he wanted both of me — the one I show and the one I hide.”

Plus, Matthew Zapruder's poems in Come On All You Ghosts "conjure Frankenstein’s monster, White Castle’s square burgers and the Hadron Collider:"

He also has a sense of humor. “You Have Astounding Cosmic News” is set at Dazed Lute Press, which owns a soul-shaped water cooler. Then there are the moments that feel like small miracles, as in “Poem for John McCain”:

I might understand

why they call him a maverick

when he is really just a horse

a horse like me except with dark eyes

terrible from his useless suffering.”

Read Zapruder's poems from the September issue of Poetry magazine here.