Tina Cane, Poet Laureate of Rhode Island and author of Body of Work and Year of the Murder Hornet. “Christopher Locke's stunning collection Music for Ghosts paints a landscape inhabited by voices 'wounded by the curse of dumb choices', where 'God fills the clouds with his absence,' and even 'dusk presses the windows until they bruise.' Locke's poems-tender amid the grit-seek salvation and absolution as antidote to the frailties of the human condition, with a yearning both gorgeous and universal.” Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University It is the fire of art, and it is there that we warm our hands.” In work as savvy as it is elegant, Christopher Locke shows us a blaze burning brightly among the shadows. But as one poem says, we lose ourselves in what saves us.

Often eerie, always fierce and intense, it reminds us that death and the loss of love are never far away. When a new family moves into the house at 25 Trumbulls Road, the narrators vivid. “This book gets to me the way a great opera does or a noir movie. 25 Trumbulls Road (Trade Paperback / Paperback). This enchanting chapbook of tiny horror stories chills and entertains from beginning to end.Nationally acclaimed, award-winning Essex poet Christopher Locke will read from his new collection of poems MUSIC FOR GHOSTS on Tuesday, May 31 at 7:00 pm at Whitcomb’s. Each ghostly flash glows with damage, mystery, and inevitability. 'In 25 TRUMBULLS ROAD, Christopher Locke weaves together a series of eerily gorgeous narratives in which fathers, mothers, children, and dogs stumble into waking nightmares. The events at 25 TRUMBULLS ROAD will stick and cycle back through your head for weeks.' Christopher Locke has channeled the ghosts of Matt Bell, Denis Johnson, and Jac Jemc, while retaining his own unique voice.' 'A haunting, surreal, visceral collection of tales that is lyrical and poetic, while not losing its bite. His stories ask: how does a home feed on this energy, growing stronger with each new, sinister end? As compulsively readable as it is unsettling, 25 TRUMBULLS ROAD takes us to the places we're afraid to go, then leaves us at a destination where we are our most human.

Christopher Locke explores the ways in which our unspoken fears and everyday regrets sustain the darker heart of a home-its doorways and windows, its basements and lights-until it fills those corners of our lives with something close to terror. In these five tales, linked by a single haunted house, the characters move through a world suspended between nightmare and loss, where the unexplainable and disquieting are fueled by ordinary grief and longing. Five years later, the house's new set of inhabitants are visited by the spectral presence of the little girl they lost. When a new family moves into the house at 25 Trumbulls Road, the narrator's vivid dreams of a teary-eyed, raw-smelling woman who lives beneath the floor turn chillingly real. This house has seen things it won't let you forget.

25 Trumbulls Road by Christopher Locke