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In Ghost Woman, Crystal Simone Smith explores the long and deep connections between nature, personhood, ancestry, and trauma through haiku and haibun. Separated into five sections, the poems emphasize the way social bonds and landscapes are reflected in and through the environment. Smith brings her experiences with race, motherhood, and poetry into conversation with the five elements, Wind (fu), Earth (chi), Water (sui), Fire (ka), and Void (ku) to take readers through an introspective haiku journey, an exploration of the nature of the self as well as the nature of the broader world. Balancing shattering grief with ordinary moments of love and trauma with survival, Ghost Woman weaves a narrative verse of single motherhood, bearing witness, and carrying your history with you. The poems in Ghost Woman invite readers to be with nature and themselves more intentionally.

Crystal Simone Smith’s new poetry collection, Runagate, reimagines the experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in a stark and chilling response to the archives of chattel slavery: bills of sale, interviews, narratives, and fugitive runaway ads. Embodying the aesthetics and Japanese poetic forms haiku and tanka, her poems bear witness to the brutal and horrifying treatment of enslaved people and contrast their humanity with the inhumanity of their enslavers. In these poems, fugitive persons evade slave patrol hounds by climbing magnolia trees, use the cover of night and the detritus of a shipwreck to swim to freedom, and find temporary refuge in a cabin where a woman offers bread and water. Throughout, Smith poignantly envisions their flights to freedom—passages that were fueled by love, hope, and impossible dreams. She unceasingly gives voice to those who found courage in both bondage and freedom. In Runagate, the enslaved regain their stories and return to the sensory world.