Bailey119980
Florida is a haunted place. Not by ghosts in old mansions or monsters in the swamp, but by memory.
By orange groves buried beneath subdivisions. By fishing camps erased by luxury condos. By retention ponds mourning forgotten wetlands. By old roads, old storms, old dreams, and old versions of ourselves.
In twenty-four interconnected poems, Florida Gothic explores the strange soul of America's most contradictory state. Hurricanes and highways. Snowbirds and tourists. Alligators and developers. Disney castles and midnight grocery stores. The collection moves through the landscapes of modern Florida searching for the people who live beneath the postcard version of paradise.
These poems are angry. They are mournful. They are occasionally funny. They are love letters written with clenched fists.
Part social criticism, part environmental elegy, part spiritual meditation, Florida Gothic asks what happens when a place becomes both paradise and commodity. What is lost when a state grows too quickly? What survives? What does the land remember long after people forget?
At its heart, this is a book about impermanence. About storms, memory, About the ghosts we create when we love a place enough to mourn what it has become. Because every place is haunted if you stay long enough.
And no place is more beautifully haunted than Florida.