Ghosts in Summer

Ghosts in Summer is a quiet, haunting, and deeply intimate journey into the rooms we carry within us-the rooms built from childhood afternoons, family rituals, and the silences that shaped us long before we understood their weight. In these poems, Lora Dickens walks gently through the landscapes of home, gathering the fragments of memory that cling like dust to old windowpanes: the laughter that once spilled across porches, the unspoken rules that governed the dinner table, the ghosts of conversations left unfinished.

With a voice both tender and unflinching, Dickens explores the bittersweet nostalgia that follows us into adulthood-the ache of leaving, the unexpected freedom it brings, and the lingering shadows of what we could never quite say. Each poem is a doorway into a moment suspended in time: a father's hands teaching quiet resilience, a mother's lullabies softening the edges of night, siblings learning to love and wound in equal measure, and the familiar rooms that seem to speak long after they have emptied.

This collection is not merely an elegy to the past but a meditation on transformation. It traces the long, winding journey from childhood innocence through the complexities of family life, to the quiet reconciliations that arrive only when we dare to look back. Ghosts in Summer reveals that memory is both anchor and compass, that silence can bruise and heal, and that the act of remembering is itself a kind of homecoming.

Poignant, lyrical, and beautifully observant, this book invites readers to linger, to listen, and to find pieces of their own story in its warm, fading light.