Fort Collins-based poet Erica Reid’s collection Ghost Man on Second is the worthy winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for poetry, said Reid’s words in Ghost Man “forever transform[ed] the way I will see a cottonwood, a rabbit warren, and a poet. This is a book to reread and cherish.”

Erica Reid

Reid is an acknowledged “queen of the sestina,” exemplified by her poem, “Shucking:”

Perhaps my place in this world is trying to move

toward me—if I stall, stand stock still, pray to be seen,

a door will open like a fist, or an apology.

Reid’s collection of poems proudly announces her arrival. She raises her fist on the page, demanding unapologetically to be seen.

 Ghost Man on Second guides its reader as witness to, “all the ghosts” in Reid’s life, marked by estrangement. She searches for her missing elders and reconciles herself to a kind of “orphanhood.” In “Each Night I Send My Courage Out,” Reid reminds her inner dormant child: “You must grow tough, sweet girl.” The poet cycles this mental mantra despite knowing her fragility. She invites vulnerability, realizing that she will be peeled raw each time to the point where she is that wishful nine-year-old, waiting in the December cold, donned in her Easter dress.

Reid is an advocate for women’s health care as a fundamental human right, demonstrated in one of her nontraditional sonnets, “My Womb as a Room on Airbnb.” Here she teases the reader with her intentions: “Romantic getaway or girls’ night out?” the poem begins. “You’ll love the prime location.” She alludes to her body, “your private entrance, access codes arrive by text,” only given to a chosen few. Her womb, a “cozy hidden gem” may “feel like home,” and “should be put to use.” But Reid chooses differently, craftily concluding: “No Children, please.”

Rather than focusing on those ghosts who remain on second, Reid has chosen to move onward, toward a new home. This is represented in the poem “Colorado Cottonwoods.” She explains:

I am not from here. Different seeds

dust the Ohio River Valley, borne

on wetter winds. Different predators stalk

more or less the same rabbits.

Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, she is a midwesterner with a western gaze. From this grounding, Reid demonstrates her curiosity and resilience. In “North Shields Ponds” she walks “through the world: willing to see whatever is too hard to find.”

Still searching for her own respected elders, Reid has gracefully grown into that role for her niece and nephews. She tries to create for them the nurturing yet fun-loving relationships that were lacking in her own childhood. She wants to be the auntie who can “have something else to pull from behind your ear.” Not just gifts, but also wisdom, encouragement and solidarity. She hopes to inspire mischief and dares this younger generation to “Make me sweat a little.” She yearns to be their go-to elder, the relationship she craved as a girl but was denied.

To close, in the wittily titled “If Ever There Were a Time for a Long Title This Would Be It,” Reid gives herself and her reader an action item list we can all aspire to:

Throw out the old rules, even the ones you made for yourself. Especially the rules you made for yourself. Fire your guns in the air like a prospector. … Maybe see if the windows can open wider than you usually bother with. 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?

Erica Reid currently works as Marketing Manager for the Center for Musical Arts in Boulder County. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree through Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing in 2022 and now serves as Associate Poetry Director and faculty at her alma mater, as well as teaching independent workshops throughout the country. Ghost Man on Second is her first published collection of poems.