From the attuned perspective of a mother, Naming the Ghost by Emily Hockaday catalogs the continuous appearance of a single ghost throughout a house and its inhabitants. The full-length collection is a ghost story of the quietest kind.

The tone of the speaker is never truly terrified or anxious, but more curious and observant, right from the opening poem, “The Ghost is Here”, where the speaker notes how “We greet each other with stoic / silence…” The speaker establishes that the relationship with the ghost is a comfortable one. We see the ghost appear through the speaker’s spouse, where “your eyes in the dark /… they are wet reflective pools— / I see the ghost. I know you see / the same thing in mine.” While there are no dividing sections, the poems are single-page, compact poems with simple diction for easy consumption.

Hockaday makes the unusual feel familiar and usual through the poems where we see the ghost appear through intimate relationships of spouses and parents, or doing mundane tasks, like how “The ghost orders brownie mix and baby wipes and socks” (The Ghost’s Warm Breath). Even when the ghost is described as uncanny, as its own ghostly apparition, the tone is calm, factual: “The baby picks up on the electric air as I allow / the ghost in” (The Electric Air). The speaker’s family is the subject of the poems as much as the ghost itself, as an exploration of marital life, and the speaker’s observance in the same kind of awe for her newborn as for the ghost – watching and wondering.

The ghost is an actual ghost, but also a personification of fear, of grief, of trauma, as vehicles exploring the death of a father with the joyous life of a newborn child:
It may be that she’ll forget the ghost,
until one day she’s perhaps a mother herself, watching her own child,
feeling something just over her shoulder (Forget About the Ghost).

The personas do sometimes question the purpose, the origin of the ghost, in moments like in “I Held the Ghost”, how the speaker attempts to reason that “The ghost was trying to teach me about need. About the right and wrong way to love.” Hockaday takes the typical questioning when the paranormal is a part of one home – why us? Why this house? Why me? – and softens it to a lesson, not just about grief and death, but about love. You won’t want to put the book down, but find out if the ghost is every persona in the collection, or every object described, or both.