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“[Ghost Town Odes] renders forgotten towns un-forgotten. With vivid imagery and music, [Matt Schumacher] re-members, he re-embodies them onto pages of a poetic atlas. Here, a grateful reader also discovers tales about saloons and cemeteries, Great Plains buffalo and a pot-bellied pig, wild huckleberries and the bits of wedding cake fed to a deer. In one of the book’s four sections, Schumacher offers epistolary persona poems that give a panoply of candid and often wrenching histories, laments, confessions, and revelations. The chronological and geographical scope of this collection is impressive.” — Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita