A Review of Ghost in the Archive by Jennifer Loyd & Mini-Interview with the Author
Review: Ghost in the Archive
Reviewed by Bleah Patterson
Conduit Books & Ephemera. 2025. 76 pages.
Jennifer Loyd holds the complexity of the self’s relationship to history with lush, muddy hands in her debut collection Ghost in the Archive. In a triangulation of thought experiment and something akin to prayer, Loyd is both present and literal as the speaker who asks questions of the Archive and of biologist Rachel Carson.
Loyd and the speaker are compressed and merged, appearing together in several poems such as “Jenn Loyd Discovers That Nothing Bad Ever Happened at Rachel Carson’s Childhood Home.” In these moments, it is essential that Loyd and the speaker are one and the same, with no obfuscation or plausible deniability. Ghost in the Archive’s strength lies in its transposition of Rachel Carson within the contexts of history and the archive, mapping those same limitations onto the poet’s own memory and identity.
The collection opens with a kind of prologue before splitting into five distinct parts. “I Want to Tell Rachel Carson about Centralia, Pennsylvania, & 24-Hour Gas Stations” instructs the reader how to enter the collection by revealing that the speaker’s own history is tangled in the same ecosystem as Carson’s. Loyd imagines this as literal, metaphorical, and metaphysical all at once: “Take desire, for example,” Loyd begins,
All the things I’ve thrown away
in gas station bathrooms
…
I imagine they must share space in the atmosphere
with the ash of the letters she burned.
In “Conflation,” Loyd finds empowerment in Carson’s story, a woman who exhibited agency and impact over her own destiny,
a woman in her authority,
in rage and loneliness.
A woman in love with women.
The speaker takes this as permission and inspiration to reclaim herself after a lifetime of fundamentalist indoctrination and self-abandonment reframed as virtue:
An escaped fundamentalist
I just let myself out
of the gate one day.
Left the community table,
the forks in their due place,
the long-enough hemlines.
Loyd writes of the grief and freedom, sometimes indistinguishable from one another, of leaving, of loss, and of finding. “I was attracted to women / with a tourniquet smile,” she writes, seeing in Carson both her own self-realization and a potential future she did not have a template for before reading Silent Spring in community college.
The Archive becomes a character that houses both Carson and the meaning Loyd seeks in her. To deconstruct, to leave the closet, certain parts of the self must inevitably become history. Loyd is interested in that home within the Archive, wondering on the page: if the Archive holds all the discarded and escaped histories of everything, with Loyd and Carson just a filing-cabinet drawer away, then what other vital knowledge does it hold that may be the key to Loyd’s reconciliation with the past.
In “I Want to Ask the Archive about Rape Culture,” Loyd writes:
Archive, if I live in a rape culture,
what do you
live in.
In the book’s second section, focused more on parallels between queer coming out and compulsive heterosexuality, Loyd questions the Archive’s intentions and accuracy. In “Epistles in Which Rachel Carson Uses Romantic Language That Will Worry Biographers Claiming Her Relationship With Dorothy Freeman Was Strictly Platonic: A Cento,” Loyd assembles a collage of Carson’s own words toward another woman, who Loyd speculates was her lover. This act suggests that the Archive has its own agenda, one rooted perhaps in patriarchy and the erasure of queer women.
Throughout the collection, Carson’s identity as a biologist pulses beneath Loyd’s lush references to botany and life. In “Phobophobia,” she writes about the ideologized and embedded fear of high-demand religion and the alienation that comes with it. Mid-poem, Loyd realizes that these terrifying, paralyzing ideas are common:
fear of realizing there have always been plums, wild in your backyard,
along with the whirring birds, the vine-on-vine sidelines,
the night-steps where your feet found
what your hands couldn’t
For Loyd, deconstructing from the church was as much a coming out as realizing she was queer.
I left
I did
I managed
this thing I now identify
as out
she writes in “Fundamentalism.” Many lines throughout the collection echo with sharp wit and yearning: “What an embarrassment to want” (“Islomania”), and in part three of Ghost in the Archive,
she peels beets. Knobby globes,
red & warm, their brine glad to bleed
across her knuckles
…
she hates peeling beets.
No skin ever said, “I’ll just slip right off.”
In “Historical Gaydar,” Loyd wonders whether Carson was queer or whether she is simply mapping herself onto her. She wonders, too, if it is possible to know at all.
The collection ends with the speaker dwelling on Carson’s final illness, breast cancer, as Loyd turns over the bitter paradox of a woman undone by the very biology she so deeply understood. Carson’s brilliance—her drive, her independence, her freedom to love—cannot spare her. And yet, her life feels too abundant to grieve, instead her legacy becomes a charge to the reader and the speaker alike: to live more fiercely and to keep unraveling the structures that would confine women. As in the final poem, “Remember, Body,” Loyd brings together lines from earlier poems in the collection:
two women in the night water
write on each other
phosphorescent words
…
The tide always rolls back out,
and with its wash,
any creature without
something to hold onto.
“Seeing From the Outside In”: A Mini-Interview with Jennifer Loyd
Based out of Colorado, Jennifer Loyd is the author of Ghost in the Archive (2025), selected by Bob Hicok as the winner of the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize from Conduit Books & Ephemera. For her poetry exploring the archives of Rachel Carson, she received a Stadler Fellowship, as well as research grants from Purdue University, where she earned an MFA. At Texas Tech University, she earned a PhD, read for Iron Horse, and participated in Land Arts of the American West. Additionally, she has served as an editor for Copper Nickel, West Branch, and Sycamore Review. Her poetry and prose, which explore the intersection between private voice and public narratives, appear in Best New Poets, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, Swamp Pink, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.
Interview conducted by Bleah Patterson
This interview took place over email during October 2025.
Bleah Patterson: What was your process for research, and how did you balance that with your creative practice?
Jennifer Loyd: There is the visible part of research: reading, visiting archives, interviewing folks; these are all behaviors we’d recognize as research, and some of the images or language in the poems can be easily traced back to notes I took while engaging in primary research. However, long after I’ve closed a book or driven away from a historical landmark, the work of research continues. Since the human brain perceives more data than our mind can quickly make sense of, I may take years to metabolize an image, a scrap of language, or even a feeling in my body that I encountered during primary research.
For example, the photograph of a wave mentioned in “Part-Time Stalker” refers to a Polaroid I saw in 2019 in the Dorothy Freeman archives at Bates College in Maine. The photograph of a wave crashing against a boulder on a beach was striking, but as an image it never fit in any of the poems I wrote. The wave had so much kinetic energy in it, and the passion or excitement of the photographer was palpable to me, and the image replayed in my mind on and off for the next four years. I was metabolizing that image—breaking it down into constituent parts (from photograph to photographer, water, salt, force, and touch/texture), and those parts combined with other images and language I encountered over years, and they catalyzed together into some new entity. The poetic image, drawn from the photograph encountered in the act of research, did not maturate for me until years later, when it had rooted in the flotsam in my mental Rachel Carson file. Then, alongside salad, orgasms, and milkweed, it volunteered itself a part of the quotidian catalogue of a life.
Because of my trust in the above process, I don’t consider research separate from my creative practice. They are all part of the same process, which one day might be setting aside an hour in the morning to write, that night might be reading a biography—highlighter in hand—and the next day might be taking a walk in the woods and thinking about the dry husk of a milkweed seed pod.
Research is the fuel that makes writing possible. I devote a lot of time to travel, reading, being alone outdoors because I know that time will generate a spark that becomes a poem.
BP: How did you sustain your practice of brainstorming, drafting, revising, and overall creative practice while working on a project over a longer length of time?
JL: I think this is where community comes in. Relationships, personal and professional, can be a ballast against despair. As I was learning to handle rejection and disappointment, I needed people in my life who believed in my work and told me so. I had a mentor who said “it’s not a question of if, but of when you publish this book,” and a friend who told me about hearing her father gasp during a reading I gave. Experiences like that can provide external jolts of energy. And then, of course, there is my relationship with Rachel Carson. She was a lodestar for me for years before she was a subject matter. And in moments of self-doubt, I looked to her endurance, curiosity, and furious self-determination as inspiration. So although I was always in the process of strengthening my relationship with myself as a writer, and to the book as an emerging entity, I was also drawing on the confidence, support, and example of others.
But also on a craft level, I tried to view every interaction as fuel for the creative process. Everything, from the obvious act of reading or participating in workshops, to the less directly-connected behaviors such as chatting with strangers or driving across country—I try to keep a part of myself that always pays attention, remains porous, and makes connections to my writing.
Finally, it helps that poetry is unique from other art forms in that you are making these stand-alone objects, that might be “ready” to share with the world quickly, but they are also adding up to create a different object of art—the book. The book needs time to grow, change, maturate. A poet can use this dual process to their advantage. They can find satisfaction and completion in a single poem, while allowing the book to grow and change.
BP: At what point did you decide that this collection needed more personal parallels, interjections, and connections to your original research-based plan? What impact do you think that has on the finished project, vs your original plan…to leave yourself out?
JL: between my MFA and PhD, I was fortunate to have a Stadler Fellowship. I decided to use that year to only write when I “felt like it” versus responding to the external pressure of having a workshop deadline every week. Part of me worried I wouldn’t write “enough” with that strategy, but what happened instead was a relaxation about the manuscript that opened spaces where before there had been dead ends. I paused my thinking about the manuscript as a manuscript and began to think of it more as a work of art. With that new perspective, I could see where it needed more. And what that “more” was, for me, was vulnerability, risk, and intimacy. Showing more of my seams.
When I began this project, I think I found safety in writing about someone else and in having the gravity of “history” behind the project. But that safety became limiting. I began to experience what Audre Lorde said— “the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house.” The objectivity and distance that I thought were “appropriate” for an historical project were hiding both the “I” and my labor. In that year of writing only for pleasure or curiosity, I stepped outside of the paradigm I had been using and started writing from my personal strengths, such seeing from the outside in, movement as a method of knowledge, and vulnerability as strength.
Bleah Patterson is a queer, southern poet from Texas. A current PhD student at the University of North Texas, much of her work explores the contention between identity and home. Her creative and academic work has been featured or is forthcoming in various journals including Write or Die, Electric Literature, Pinch, Grist, The Laurel Review, Phoebe Literature, The Rumpus, and Taco Bell Quarterly.