Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska is Erin Noteboom's remarkable debut collection of poetry. Based on the recollections of a World War II veteran who asks to never have his name put on anything, Ghost Maps introduces us to the intimacies of war with poems sharp as fragments of metal, and soft as falling snow. With a voice that belongs not to the veteran that answered her questions, nor quite to herself, Noteboom pulls forward images of war, following the pulse of the seasons. We read of a hand, unattached to a body and mistaken for a glove; the woman left at home, with German POW's shoveling snow from her roof; and a soldier stumbling into a beehive. Poems pass through fall and winter, until, in summer, we follow our narrator home. The collection then traces the rest of his life to his later days when he meets with the “lady researcher? who collects his stories. Ghost Maps will acquaint readers with ghosts never to be forgotten, in a book that marks the entry of a highly talented new poet.

Erin Noteboom is a physicist turned poet turned children's novelist, whose honours include the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award, the CBC Literary Award for poetry, and a Governor General's Award. She has previously published two volumes of poetry, Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska (2003) and Seal Up the Thunder (2005), as well as a memoir, The Mongoose Diaries: Excerpts from a Mother's First Year (2007). Her novels for young readers (published under her married name, Erin Bow) are Plain Kate, Sorrow's Knot, The Scorpion Rules, The Swan Riders, and the middle-grade novel Stand on the Sky, which was winner of the 2020 Governor General's Award for Young People's Literature. Erin's day job is writing about things like black holes and quantum gravity at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

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