Ghost in the Graveyard
Winner of the 2025 Hudson Prize
Black Lawrence Press
February 2027
How can we claim a place as a “home” if that home no longer exists? Not because we moved away but rather, the physical town is just…gone. Through the lens of a former ghost town in Wyoming that was eventually demolished, the poems in Ghost in the Graveyard (winner of the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press) explore identity and our relationship to the physical places in our life and how those places can (or, sometimes, fail to) define us, especially when there is no “home” to return to.
Advance Praise
“Ghost in the Graveyard is an archive of vanishings—the towns across the country that have emptied and become myths of place that arrive and vanish like snow.”
- Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal
“In this striking debut, Nicholl evokes a whole poetic world that describes abandonment and lost dreams with tremendous skill, sensitivity and dramatic flair. Nicholl gives his readers the beauty of invention alongside the ruin of time.”
- Mark Wunderlich, author of MATEY
“By remembering them, Greg Nicholl, honors the forgotten places and people of working-class American towns in his brilliant collection of poems, Ghost in the Graveyard. These poems are the stories behind the pictures in that box of old photographs you discovered at the thrift store.”
- Kim Richey, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter
“This is a book of an American afterlife, a map of towns that refuse to vanish with histories that won’t stay buried… Nicholl writes like a cinematographer, turning ruin into an intimate scene of something beautiful. Nicholl shines a flashlight into forgotten corners; these poems just don’t haunt—they witness.”
- Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Accidental Devotions
“A flare of light, bleached faces in a photograph, a town dissolving into memory—so begins Greg Nicholl’s Ghost in the Graveyard, a restless and remarkable debut collection that crisscrosses the country surveying our abandoned places.”
- Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer