McCabe, Chris: Dreamt by Ghosts

Tenement Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 31, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 

The fourteenth entry in Tenement’s “Yellowjacket” series, a rough-hewed dreamscape of haunted ideas, ideations, & iterative ideograms from the poet, author, & librarian. A broken bibliography of facts, phantasy, and wyrd / weird arts & practices.

Radically exciting, this text has Beckett and Shakespeare, and all of Poe’s possibilities. As would Derrida, Dreamt by Ghosts leads you toward more and more… In no way can I sum up how remarkable is this ghostly manuscript, and how delighted and in fact privileged I am to have been able to read it, with all its illuminated pauses and twists.

Mary Ann Caws

An act of autobiographical digression defying easy categorisation, Chris McCabe’s Dreamt by Ghosts is a fractal work of hauntology that, at its core, owes to a journal written between the Spring of 2020 and the Summer months of 2023. What begins its life as a porous pillow book—a private meditation on dreams—swiftly devolves to let its own organisational structure slide and glide to inform, instead, a facsimile document of strange coincidences, conniptions, and connivances to refract and reject a moment of enforced isolation. A singular, personal anthology of the wyrd and weird—of ghosts, of place, and of fractured perception—Dreamt by Ghosts maps and charters a perspectival prison-break in times of trouble.

Here, we’ve a paean to people—to strangers—and to the subaltern and subterranean life of the associative eye, the meandering ‘I.’ To the verge and border of genre, to the ever-eerie idea of a cityscape. From a silent London to the backstreets of Liverpool (be they remembered, revised, or revisited)—documenting the loss of poets, the perseverance of family, and the joy and jouissance of friendship and fraternity—this elegiac collation of McCabe’s ephemera and poetry exacts itself as an examination of the ever-percolating idea. How the shape and length of a blank notebook is tilled to become a canvas for the dynamism of our diurnal lives.

We’ve imagined and citational cameo from Fassbinder, from Mark E. Smith—from Chika Sagawa, John Cale, and a myriad more—in a volume interspersed with new poetry, distractions and diversions—typewritten visual poems—and concentrated, coincident-rich, essayistic excoriations of our cultural moment. McCabe’s Ghosts is an effort to socialise the interior life, to take the wits for a walk, and all to defy the idea and determinism of our journeying toward any pre-set intellectual destination.