This is the second of four award-winning poetry books by Jesse Graves, widely considered one of the strongest Southern poets of his generation. He was born in 1973 in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, a very rural Appalachian community where his ancestors settled in the 1780s. These poems reflect on that heritage. "What pleases most about Jesse Graves's Basin Ghosts is the deep love abiding in every poem--for words and all their power; for the Powell River, the ghost of it still moving "beneath the crush of...lake and dam"; for the past and all those who we have left "with the earth"; for the music of Ellington as well as the night's silence; for Graves's daughter and his wife, who with him writes the book of their love, so full of "indirection and suspense, [that he] can't stand to put it down." And neither can we. This love encompasses us, dear reader, for we write this book, too, and Jesse Graves helps us to know the grave importance of this our only task--to write our lives full of love"--Jim Minick