A Review of Ghost Man on Second by Erica Reid

Review by Susan Delaney Spear

Loading the Bases

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Erica Reid, Ghost Man on Second. Autumn House, 2024.

Review by Susan Delaney Spear

Erato, Urania? Which of the brave muses
will claim my janky poems, the ones that blur
comedy & bruise, elegy & sway?
Calliope, send your sister to grip me by the throat
until truth steams from every vent in my body.
I’ll take any mother’s touch, even if she’s a myth.

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In her debut poetry collection Ghost Man on Second, Erica Reid gives us glimpses into the pain of her early years, but Reid gives us more than loss, neglect, and longing. She transforms the hurts of a fraught childhood into art. In her hands, pain gives birth to well-crafted poems that tell the brutal truth. Beautifully. And something deeper, perhaps more important, is at work here: Reid is a poet with a playful imagination, smitten with language.

The title poem, “Ghost Man on Second” describes a game of wiffle ball with too few players to cover the infield. Her father teaches her about the “ghost man” who will run the bases for her so she can take another turn at bat. From the title poem onward, Reid uses the baseball game motif to engage her readers. The sections are titled First, Second, Third, and Home. We are off and running the bases beside her, away from home and toward home.

Section One begins with the dream poem “Disorder,” which lets us in on the poet’s journey and offers us a way to protect ourselves as we read: “Follow me / into hostile terrain. / If the terror feels overwhelming, / step one is to give it a name.” Reid plays with language at every opportunity, and I recommend reading slowly, because these poems are deadly serious and delightfully playful. The poem “Five Story House” is a prose poem with five sections: Ground, Second, Third, Fourth, and Rooftop (note the connection to baseball) that opens “Everything begins, somehow. I wish I could remember / the moment before I began to hurt this way.” Readers who have experienced early loss will understand this longing and relate to the poet (or the runner).

“Emily,” a 14-stanza sonnet crown, is the entirety of section two and the tour de force of the book. The “truth” surely “steams” from Reid’s pen in these narrative vignettes of her relationship with her mother: driving lessons, a girl’s first period, a mother-daughter trip gone awry, and painful seasons of silence. The crown begins and ends with her mother’s words: “It’s you and me against the world.” While writing of the difficulties, Reid doesn’t withhold the positive: “Nobody loved me harder. / I am trying // Not to reduce our past to a cartoon / the way we sometimes end our myths too soon.” Nor does she exempt herself from blame: “I’m sure I said / some jackass teenage thing….” The measured sonnet form is a strong container for these painful details that connect and repeat. The crown contains allusions to the myth of Persephone and Demeter: “What debt does Persephone owe Demeter, or / is mine the only mother keeping score?” The form and the hat tips to the age-old myth infuse the crown with gravitas, a recognition of the complexity of mother-daughter relationships through the ages and essentially answer the poet’s question. “No, yours is not the only mother keeping score.”

Almost before we know it, we are standing on third base, reading poems born in Colorado:

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I have scoured for my own losses
in another’s mess. Still facing Ohio,
I watch for the sky to shift. If anything
changes, it waits until I have moved on.

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This section’s poems are of a different texture. After the up-close narrative voice in “Emily,” the poet turns to lyrics filled with birds, trees and a new landscape. “Deciduous” points out that like trees whose leaves fall, human milk teeth are also labeled deciduous, and Reid layers the interesting etymology with psychological import:

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Between January stars, I can name an evergreen or two.
After all, not every tree agrees to drop its teeth.
Deciduous is the word for who lets go, as well as who falls.

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On third base, the atmosphere changes. The reader senses the poet turning a corner (pun intended) in this game of life. “Nivose” (If you don’t know the word, look it up. This is part of the pleasure of reading Reid’s poems.) delights with its snow imagery:

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here egg cream, egg lace, fault spidering egg,
here bleached shell, here glint of promise, last dregs of deep winter,
here bone china, kingfisher’s belt, second wedding pearl,
antimacassar.

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Here, Reid adds to her remarkable imagery a new sense of hope, and perhaps joy?

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we see a dazzle of cold futures,
we see airless depths of the sky,
we see water hushing under,
we see the paths we might yet take
             made new for us, as though it were possible
             to encounter a world unspoiled by out stepping
             as though we had been forgiven overnight.

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At the crack of the bat, we run toward home and the umpire shouts “Safe.”

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She believed I could not stay upright on my own—
Such a jolt to find out I’m all right on my own.

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The speaker is surprised to find herself “all right,” but the reader is not. Reid’s voice is strong, even when sharing painful experiences, perhaps especially then. Throughout, Reid shows us her mastery of metered lines. And, in this final section she includes several nonce forms which highlight the breadth of her talents. I will not discuss them here because, well, buy the book!

This final section includes two memorable sonnets. “My Womb as a Room on Airbnb” reads as an advertisement, another clever way to write of a serious topic.

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A room this stunning should be put to use!
You’ll be the first to rate us. [Click to book.]
           Free tea & coffee. Space for bikes & skis.
           Quiet hours past ten. No children, please.

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The second is “Smash Room,” which describes a girls’ night out at a room filled with junk for the women to destroy as they please, for a small fee, one assumes. “The whole thing’s orgiastic—ersatz sex— / but it will do. Sometimes a girl must shatter.”

The book ends with a prose poem in which the poet urges herself into a brand-new game: “This is a time for something new, for something you’ve been afraid to try—you have bigger things to fear now….See if something in you can open wider too. Spread that rib cage wide & let a bird in. What the hell. There was a time when birds could not nest inside you, but who can remember that other life?”

The Muses have surely lent their fire to these poems “that blur comedy & bruise” in lyric and narrative. Although the poet leaves us with the sense that she can barely remember the earlier sorrows and is headed somewhere bigger and wider, I suspect she is still running toward home. After all, these artful poems were written by a poet who confides in a near whisper (as it reads to me): “I’ll take any mother’s touch, even if she’s a myth.” I suspect that Erica Reid’s truest home is poetry, right here, between these lines.

Susan Delaney Spear is the author of two collections of poetry: Beyond All Bearing and On Earth..., the 2025 American Legacy Book Award for poetry/religious. She is co-author, with David J. Rothman, of Learning the Secrets of English Verse, a poetry textbook that teaches meter and form. Beginning with the Summer / Fall 2026 issue, she will become the co-editor of Think: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays. She lives and writes in Tampa, Florida. You can find her at www.susandelaneyspear.com.