Bleeding Ghosts - Paperback

by Lara Chamoun (Author)

Bleeding Ghosts, the debut collection from Lara Chamoun, is a lyrical exploration of grief, perception, and identity, working in the currents of experimentalism and Surrealism. Though each individual piece stands on its own, towing the line of poetry and fiction, the core narrative of the collection follows an unnamed protagonist whose lover's death fractures their sense of reality, leaving them untethered. Their world shifts between the intimate and the incomprehensible, and they spiral into detachment and delusion. Eventually, a second self - The Watcher - emerges, offering an external gaze that forces them to reckon with who they have become and how they envision their future. What follows is a slow, dull awakening, a step back into the real world, a movement toward elsewhere, and even toward the possibility of love again.

Bleeding Ghosts resists a single reading. The narrative is submerged beneath a dream logic that reflects the absence of stability or clear distinctions between what is memory, what is the present moment, what is perception and what is reality. The work draws inspiration from authors who blur the limits of the conscious and the subconscious - think Sabrina Orah Mark or Leonora Carrington. In some ways, more than a story, it is an atmosphere.