Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock

by Hillary Leftwich

Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock is a multi-genre collection that examines grief, violence, heartbreak, and the universal challenge of living in a body that is always vulnerable. In this greyscale kaleidoscope of the familiar and the uncanny, muted voices shout, people commit to devastating choices, and mundane moments are filled with silent hauntings. A sleep paralysis and a séance of voices long dead, this collection’s characters illuminate both our own darkness and our strength, revealing how love can emerge from the most impossible of conditions.

Genres: Poetry, Short Stories, Fiction

132 pages, Paperback

Published October 7, 2019

About the author

Hillary Leftwich is the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press, 2019 and Agape Editions, 2023 new edition), Aura (Future Tense Books and Blackstone Audio Publishing, 2022), and Saint Dymphna’s Playbook (TBA). She has published or has work forthcoming in The Sun, Santa Fe Writers Project, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, and other publications and has written reviews for High Country News, Heavy Feather Review, and others. She teaches creative writing at The University of Denver, Colorado College, Unity College, and Lighthouse Writers, and teaches youth for Lighthouse Youth. She is an active judge for the Colorado Book Awards and has served as a judge for the James Yaffe Prize in fiction and The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in poetry. She has been awarded scholarships for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Margaret Randall scholarship for Naropa University. She teaches Tarot and Tarot writing workshops focusing on strengthening divination abilities and writing. Find her www.hillaryleftwich.com and www.pw.org

Reviews

[Jan Stinchcomb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a longtime admirer of Hillary Leftwich, and this collection is everything I wanted it to be, filled with objectionable moms, sick loved ones, working class life, and sweet transgressions. Her narrators are the irrepressible misfits who manage to survive. Whether she is experimenting with form or telling it straight, Leftwich proves herself to be a master of microfiction.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock' is a debut collection of flash fiction, prose-poetry, and memoir by Denver poet Hillary Leftwich. I've long looked forward to this one, and it's a visceral, honest, and sexy collection. It begins with twilight and a sky full of birds, and ends with a love letter, and in the intervening images, poetry, and scenes, Leftwich casts an artful spell.
'Ghosts... ' has recurring, particular themes—salvation, relationships, motherhood, hope, and vulnerability. Included are "Huckleberry," where a figure mistaken for Val Kilmer morphs into a long-dead friend. The narrator looks at the friend, whose mouth opens, “to say what you never had the chance to say but all that comes out is a tiny white cloud.” Those tiny white clouds of untranslatable language appear elsewhere, too, in "Dead Boys," or as the foam from an OD's mouth, the puffs of carbon monoxide from a tailpipe, or a spill of stars from the mouth of a witch.
I also enjoyed "Bottle Rocket,” with its internal monologue of a girl blossoming during her first heavy-petting session. In her confusion, she thinks, “not knowing if this is right or wrong, if this is where it all starts, or how it is supposed to start. You think you need to listen to your brother and just shut up and grow up.” Or “Lullaby,” with its memorable warning, “You smell like hot candy.”
'Ghosts...' is a voice-driven collection. In "Acetone," a single mom gets her nails done for a date, "pleased at how expensive I must look." On the flip side, in "They Tasted Like the Dollar Store Candy I Bought My Son Every Year at Xmas," the date gets cancelled. Food money spent on the manicure, the hungry protagonist "bit each nail off and spit them on the floor. The purple tasted bitter and the gemstones were slightly salty. It may have been the glue." The challenges of single parenthood are explored in myriad ways, and the measuring sticks are not always fair. This theme is explored in the poem, "Me and My Boy," and in the stunning "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up in Single-Parent Households" and "Playdate," each of which reveals the storm and stress of parenting in modern times. In "Examination," a gynecologist visit becomes an examination of conscience.
Leftwich is poetry and prose editor of Heavy Feather Review, and is director of a monthly reading series in Denver, At the Inkwell. Flash fiction writers should add this one to their libraries. I look forward to reading more of her work.

Note: I was provided a review copy by the publisher.

[Chris LaTray · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a dark, gorgeous, compelling collection of work from Hillary Leftwich. When I first started reading I was expecting a book of poetry and was happily surprised to find flash essays, mostly. But even they are as much poetry as prose in the beauty of the language, the surreal nature of much of the imagery. Hillary is a tough and kind and fierce and lovely writer and we are lucky to be able to experience her work. I loved this book.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alternately melancholic and indignant, raucous and despondent, Hillary Leftwich's Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock reads like a lexical version of a long-thought-lost grunge rock opus, its evocative, sometimes concrete, sometimes dreamy, sometimes lurid imagery like a textual performance of a Harmony Korine film.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are wonderful stories. My favorites are the surreal ones, but there is always a tension, a significant immediacy, that makes them all work beautifully. The exact right word to hit home, the details that can’t be forgotten, there’s just so much right in these writings. Excellent work.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found myself holding my breath at points. Love the hybridity of genres.

[Shilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are dreams, letters, missives, legends, fragments to a harsh world, to softness, to the ways we hurt one another, to the ways we hurt ourselves. Each flash story is a fractal of an entire lifetime, a kaleidoscopic haunt of want.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her debut hybrid collection, Leftwich seamlessly slips on the skins of countless storytellers to immerse us in tales that are both foreboding and funny, woeful and wondrous, surreal and sharply familiar. There is a unifying thread that stitches together the many voices pressed within these pages, and that is the deeply inescapable human condition of longing. This collection of flash fiction, memoir, and poetry lays bare how our voices echo through past, present, and future to call out our primordial need to see and be seen, to touch and be touched, to hear and be heard. It unveils how our desire for connection persists, no matter how our lives change or if our lives cease to be. In these pages there is pain, there is resilience, there is grace, and ultimately there is the unending search to find and hold fast to one another, even to those who may have moved on to places we can’t yet follow.

[Nan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love everything about this book -- from the cover art to the title, the framing pages ("Knock Knock", "Who's There?) to the contents. The voice here is always rich and strong, smokey like a forest after a summer rainstorm. The characters are familiar and strange. I know the landscapes they walk even though I've never seen them. I find myself sitting on the bus with the narrator and her son in "Hide-and-Seek", listening to Carl laughing in "Coping", and falling down a hellish mine in "Tajo". As others have said before me, Leftwich is a master. I look forward to her future and reading more.

[Monty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through a variety of narrators, perspectives, and a dash of the supernatural, Hillary Leftwich explores working life, motherhood, grief, trauma and hope in this flash fiction collection.

[Hsu Jui-Ting · Rating 3 out of 5]

The opening few stories read a bit uneven in my perspective, seemingly attached more by narrative novelty (the mundane observation tethered by a personal twist) than any recognizable stylistic impetus, but this does change rather quickly. The longer, more narrative-driven entries engage the reader best, as they unfold both mundane and surrealist qualities in a way that complement and in fact emerge from the other.

This might be a re-read in the future (Amazon delivered a damaged book as a new sale, so here's to a return where a proper new copy is sent).

[Alarie]

I confess I read only half this collection, mostly flash fiction with some poems and prose poems thrown in. I just didn't care for it, although I did like a few of the pieces at the beginning of the book. The darker and more violent it became, the less I wanted to read, so I stopped. However, most of you think this book deserves five stars. I acknowledge Leftwich is a talented author. It all comes down to taste, not a critique of talent. That's why I'm not giving a rating.

[Eric S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How To Knock is a collection of stories and poems that range topics. Hillary is able to deliver a vivid picture with few words. I wasn't able to find all of the stories accessible, but there were quite a number that really resonated making the book well worth the time spent reading. I have read through it several times, with Huckleberry being my favorite. I strongly recommend this book.

[Emily Wortman-Wunder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection slipped into my brain like an intruder through a broken screen...these dreamlike multigenre flash pieces about the emotional and physical dangers of having a body haunt me.

[Jennifer Givhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visceral, boundary-blurring, badass--just like its powerful author.