Erasure for Holy Ghost

C22 Collective Open Editions Chapbook | March 2025

ISBN: 979-8300913229 | 44 pages | $ 10

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Erasure for Holy Ghost is an experimental poetic engagement with free jazz legend Albert Ayler. Among the leaders in 1960s avant-garde free jazz, Ayler’s far out style provoked polarizing reactions from audiences, critics, and musicians. Ayler’s playing was labeled as intense, emotional, simplistic, spiritual, genius, and unlistenable. Peterson’s poetry uses vocabulary extracted, erased, sampled, and reconstituted from a variety of Ayler-related materials, channeling the musician’s powerful lyrical and spiritual style.

“Erasure for Holy Ghost swirls and vibrates like the screaming saxophone of Albert Ayler, rejoicing and soaring and dancing in the ghostly eye and ear control mayhem, finding verbal equivalents, possibilities, and basking in the ecstatic explosions of ferocious freedom in Ayler’s musical revolution.” – Joshua Martin