Festival Poetry Event: Michelle Diaz - Raising Ghosts

Raising Ghosts is a powerful, courageous gathering of poems, charting a childhood shaped by poverty and the gravitational pull of a mercurial mother – “A fathomless black hole / The planet of love we orbited”. In poems marked by subtle but destabilising shifts in tone, Michelle Diaz excavates the long afterlife of loss: the child in the isolation ward, the abandoned house with “three toddlers [who] opened empty cupboards”, the adult woman still searching the rubble of herself for the mother, and for the child who once lived there. Moving from the raw elegy of its first half into the fractured relationships and psychic hauntings of adulthood, the poems ask what we do with the ghosts that raise us, returning to what remains after a mother’s absence has reshaped the world. Raising Ghosts is a stunning meditation on grief, survival and the enduring, echoing presence of the past.'

Michelle Diaz began her poetry career in Covent Garden, London, where she attended Poetry Unplugged at the Poetry Café from 1998 to 2004. Michelle was first published in 2009 by Live Canon, and a group of actors performed her winning poems at Greenwich Theatre. 
Michelle has been published in numerous poetry journals, e.g. Under the Radar, Candlestick Press and 14 Magazine, among others. 
In 2019 her debut pamphlet, The Dancing Boy was published by Against the Grain Press. 
Michelle’s work looks at a variety of subjects; childhood, motherhood, mental health issues, grief and loss. And of course – ghosts!