The poems in This American Ghost address the complicated and often invisible consequences of our American expansion—the violence and history of the indigenous body as an inheritor of trauma. Whether in the grief and lingering aftermath of a loved one’s suicide, counting the pulse of the chaotic viscera when entering indigenous myth, or re-witnessing the state-sanctioned loss and tearing of a body’s mother tongue, these poems stand waiting at the border between survival and what’s been erased—these ghosts left breathing and still longing for any bloom inside the wreckage of our American conquest. Throughout this short collection, words and phrases are braided with English and nimipuutímt, images of surrealism enter desperate realities, underscoring how language—which begins in the body as it listens to the immediate world—is the only fabric we have to dress and ultimately give shape to our wounds.