Traumatized by the events…

of *We Take Me Apart,* the unlikely heroine of *Desire: A Haunting* leads a silent life in the cottage that has been in her family since Hester Prynne first bequeathed it to Pearl — whose endearingly cranky spirit remains. So begins this strange friendship between “dog” and a ghost calling herself “Ogie." A different kind of love story, *Desire* is about how dog and Ogie learn to care for each other after only pretending to at first, about how they adopt a ghost child named William whose fascination with holidays brings celebration to the cottage, and about how long-ago dresses made from flowers stitch the three of them closer and invite new spirit into their lives.

PRAISE

“Even alone, writes Molly Gaudry, ‘we are not unloved.’ And indeed, a reader cannot help but be trapped in tentacles of love when reading her twisting, tender Desire: A Haunting. No one but Gaudry paints language with so much care, with so much lonely, heart-dreamed beauty. No one else paints scars so naked and so necessary. This book is a breathing thing, a piece of life-in-love-in-art.” —AMBER SPARKS, author of The Unfinished World and Other Stories

“With the sharpest of knives, Molly Gaudry carves richness and poverty, sadness and sweetness, violence and love into the reader's consciousness. A cut neck, a suicide, a drowning, you want to look away, but you don't, because you would miss your chance to live. Desire: A Haunting is a perfect, tender book.” —AMINA CAIN, author of Creature

“Every single word in this book counts.” —ANN VANDERMEER, editor of Best American Fantasy

“Full of light and darkness, Gaudry creates a fairy tale to awaken the reader’s soul.” —SHOME DASGUPTA, Necessary Fiction

“This tale does not offer a clear progression out of the past into the present or the future, or from ‘victim’ to ‘survivor’ as readers have come to expect. . . . Gaudry’s work points to a subtler sense of peacemaking and restoration.” —CRISTINA DEPTULA, Synchronized Chaos

“Thus, living on the extreme fringe of human habitation like the proverbial witch of the western literary and cultural imagination . . . the speaker of these poems invites the reader into an unseen world through a seen one. . . . a world filled by invisible spirits with their other histories of violence and survival; therefore the speaker who must necessarily live alone isn’t alone. Instead, each life, present and past, is mingled and merged into the cottage that is also the house of history.” —NANDINI BHATTACHARYA, The Laurel Review

“Each page is an epiphany of spectral nesting dolls: open love to expose lamentation; crack the soft skeleton of memory to release matriarchal debt — and hidden inside it all, Gaudry's spare lyric floats through us, ethereal and elegant.” —LILY HOANG, author of A Bestiary

“This book is more poem than most poems — ghosts — literary and created — populating a prose broken into savage and sweet lines — hands drawn through viscera and the appearance thereof — to concoct a drama as yet untold yet retold a thousand times over: love love love love love, I love you I love you. Gaudry is our Neruda, our Marquez, our chronicler of times spent and as yet foretold.” —JAMIE IREDELL, author of Last Mass

“Plenty of books are described as “dreamlike,” but few back up that adjective as thoroughly as Molly Gaudry’s do. We Take Me Apart and Desire: A Haunting both traffic in impressions, generous space on the page, and characters we know without knowing how we know them.” —KATHARINE COLDIRON, The Adroit Journal

“A pretty book that gives the reader vertigo as the words and images kind of swirl around the page and through the reader's head in an intimate and heartbreaking manner that reminded me of early Anne Carson.” —SHANE JONES, author of Crystal Eaters

“Desire: A Haunting is a novel broken into lines, & this breakage uses the space of the page to enact the blank spaces of myth & the fantastic, of memory & desire. The narrator asserts that ‘sometimes we are powerless against our passions,’ yet in the book power matures in passion’s interstices, makes sense of trauma & develops it into strength. This is a delightful, unsettling & addictive book in which the dead speak to & follow the living, in which memory knots into presence, in which love is always a ghost.” —MATHIAS SVALINA, author of Destruction Myth

PROLOGUE

before the first soft light of day

I am undressed and in the water

with every stroke

I stretch

reach

pull toward my heart

and push away behind me

some memory of you

how you love to have the tea house trimmed with yellow lights all winter long

how you light a candle in every window as if to say

OH COME ALL YE FAITHFUL

but I am not joyful

my only triumph today

is I have risen before dawn and forced my body into water

where there is nothing but water to feel

I do this because I can’t stand to open my eyes in the cottage

to see so clearly morning streaming through curtains

as if nothing happened here

every day I remove myself from bed

grope in the dark

hold my breath to keep from screaming all the way from the last step of the back porch to just past the cherry blossoms

even the cherry blossoms

remind me

I have been trying to write

more than anything

I want my voice to ring true to you when I say I am trying to stay positive

with every word

I fail

on my back now

floating

I let my arms and shoulders rest

watch the sun rise over the sea

over me

kick my way slowly back to shore

tired and numb

the way I need to be to start each day

and still she is waiting

all winter long

since Christmas

she has been waiting

every morning

when I return from my swim

she is waiting

standing

on the back porch

arms outstretched

saying YOU CAN’T IGNORE ME FOREVER