Ghost in the Club
Greg Zorko
84 pages
Cover art: Teo Zamudio
ISBN 9780993946486
Spring 2016
I go to the club
and coat check my entire body
Ghost in the Club is a book of poems based on an unreleased number one hit song. It has over 500 million views on YouTube. It makes you blueberry pancakes in the morning when you’re hungover. It wilts on the floor like a weirdo flower. Using understatement, uncanny non-sequiturs, and a sharp sense of humour, these poems amplify the minute details that make up everyday life and quietly celebrate their overlooked charm.
Praise
“Greg Zorko’s poems are like little .zip files of emotion: efficiently compressed, quickly unpacked, and sometimes dangerous in their infectious construction. He excels at exploring those tough-to-define emotions sneaking around behind the backs of the big ones. He’s also funny as hell; Ghost in the Club is like a joke book for people who are sick of joking around.”
– August Smith, author of By Which Texture Do We Find Truth
“Reading Ghost in the Club felt like jealously reading through the iMessage log of two people who love each other a lot, eavesdropping on their opinions on fried cheese curds, nephews’ birthday parties, Chicago Bulls leggings, Honey I Shrunk The Kids and Pokémon Blue. These poems made me want to sneak up on a person from very far away, possibly hundreds or even thousands of miles, and whisper into their ear: ‘T-Pain’.”
– Crispin Best, Faber New Poets 14
Press
The Public – “All of Zorko’s poems carry this same air of mumbled wisdom and sadness, each of them like an offhandedly profound text message received from your bored best friend.”
The Town Crier – “[Greg Zorko’s poetry] is immediate, unapologetic, straight up, and, for that reason, memorable.”
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly – Summer Reads – “Greg Zorko’s collection of short poems is an efficient and well-executed series of gut-punches. With titles like ‘smoke cloud emoji’, ‘energy efficient lightbulb’, and ‘DIY haircut’ setting the tone, Zorko’s collection taps into the daily struggles of being a regular ol’ human being. And while the term ‘millennial’ has become a bad word of sorts when describing literature, Ghost in the Club nonetheless taps into the awkwardness of the anxious twenty-to-thirty-something, allowing for the collection to adopt an undeniable sense of universality, and subtle cool.”
