In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Theodora Ziolkowski‘s Ghostlit is a visceral and inspiring poetry collection.
Kayleb Rae Candrilli wrote of the book:
“The poems of Theodora Ziolkowski’s Ghostlit ripple with such self-assured strength that it is impossible not to feel stronger and more resolute for having read them. Humming with myth and memory, Ziolkowski laces lines with chiffon and sunflower petals, carves and crafts these poems toward an exhilarating freedom. Ziolkowski writes, ‘Pompeii was destroyed because of the direction the wind was blowing.’ And isn’t that the truth. But as often as the wind brings destruction, it carries you from it. Allow these poems to be the wind that carries you to safety and a new softness.”
In her own words, here is Theodora Ziolkowski‘s Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Ghostlit:
Ghostlit is a collection of poems about memory and trauma and art and art making. The book’s central speaker considers fairy tales and mythology, as well as cinema and music, to understand and to even re-see her past and her choices as she looks back on the years she endured in an emotionally abusive relationship. In poems about her work at a memory care center, she considers Elvis and B.B. King and the songs she repeatedly listened to while working with residents at the care facility. In one of many poems about the body, the speaker recalls “a performance / where the singer wanders / through a bright forest / of ethereal birches” and, in another, “threw [herself] from painting to painting, / then studied Caravaggio’s Narcissus / gazing into the reflection of the stream.” It makes complete sense to me that a soundtrack exists for the poems that appear in my collection, as the speaker’s own memories are saturated with music. With this playlist, I aim to highlight the genres and vocals that are already baked into the speaker’s thinking, as well as to reflect the myriad moods and aesthetics that give texture to her reckoning.
Prelude and Rooftop, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Bernard Hermann
The cover for Ghostlit reminds me so much of the famous opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo (1958), with its color-steeped focus on that famous, hallucinatory eye. Between its trilling, menacing strings and swell of horns, “Prelude and Rooftop” feels like a fitting overture for the unsettling current that defines the speaker’s growing reclamation of her past in Ghostlit.
It’s Now or Never, Elvis Presley
I can’t impress enough upon the listeners of this playlist the import that Elvis Presley had on the making of the memory care center poems. These poems are based on my own experience working as a lifecare specialist at a memory care facility.
Perhaps the speaker in one of my memory care center poems sums it up best:
What I love
about the care center are the doilies
& rose wallpaper, dancing with the residents to Elvis Presley
It’s a desire for the past I had no part in,
for the King of Rock n’ Roll crooning
The residents I worked with adored listening to Elvis. How many of my own memories of my time working at the center are saturated with his voice? “It’s Now or Never” feels like a fitting refrain for the experience at the heart of Ghostlit. A victim of abuse must relinquish herself from that abuse to survive—“it’s now or never.”
Tears Dry On Their Own, Amy Winehouse
I listened to this song a lot when I was living in Houston, where many of the poems in Ghostlit are set. Amy Winehouse’s inimitable velvety alto, her clipped diction—combined with this track’s trumpet and drums—makes this song a fitting anthem for any doomed relationship.
Blue Moon, Dean Martin
This is another song the speaker listens to with the residents at the memory care center. There are so many gorgeous renditions of “Blue Moon.” For the purposes of this playlist, however, I like the quiet, sultry quality of Martin’s rendition.
Goodie Bag, Still Woozy
I love the Goodie Bag music video, which features Still Woozy dancing and biking in an aquamarine and grape color-block windbreaker (I spent a lot of time dancing and biking between writing and editing the poems in Ghostlit). The vocals of the chorus feel cotton candy-colored, and yet the lyrics themselves are self-reflective: “Oh, what they think about you / Prepare to leave my body when the time it comes through / Lovin’ on you ’til the time it comes through.” I am drawn to that juxtaposition.
Walk On By, Dionne Warwick
Perhaps this is an unexpected, albeit fitting pairing for Winehouse’s “Tears Dry On Their Own” (the music video for the latter shows Winehouse walking down street after street). “Walk On By” is another broken heart song. While the speaker in Ghostlit isn’t necessarily lamenting a broken relationship, she is lamenting a loss of self, albeit one she ultimately reclaims. One can’t help but be pulled in by Warwick’s voice, her inflection with every repetition of the words, “by” and “cry.”
Mind Playin’ Tricks, Geto Boys, Scarface
I no longer live in Houston (where many of the poems in Ghostlit are set), but when I did, I often listened to Houston rap on my commutes to and from campus, so I knew I needed a quintessential Houston rap song on this playlist. I have my husband, the writer Will Burns, to thank for this one.
The Thrill Is Gone, B.B. King
The poem, “There is a fact of memory & there is a fact of feeling,” appears in the fourth and final section of Ghostlit, where the poems begin to point toward a conclusion, one in which the speaker confronts her abuse from a greater distance and with a more detached lens. In the penultimate stanza of the poem, the speaker describes how “For hours, [she] listened to B.B. King croon / about the thrill being gone” as she assembles her bed in her new apartment. “The thrill is gone,” indeed.
I Guess I’ll Have To Change My Plan, Lester Young
Young’s sax fills me with such longing. I can’t help but think of this track as a perfect anthem for the balmy night poems set in Houston.
What A Difference A Day Made, Dinah Washington
Another song with so many wonderful renditions. I adore the clear-eyed pitch of Washington’s inflection, “my yesterday was blue, dear.” The wistfulness laced into the lyrics, Washington’s warm amber vocals—I can’t imagine the playlist for Ghostlit ending on any other track.
Theodora Ziolkowski is the author of the novella, On the Rocks, winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Prairie Schooner, no tokens, Oxford Poetry (UK), and Short Fiction (England), among others. She teaches creative writing as an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.