A Ghost in the Throat

"A fascinating hybrid work in which the voices of two Irish female poets ring out across centuries ..."

"The story that uncoils is stranger, more difficult to tell, than those valiant accounts of rescuing a 'forgotten' woman writer from history's erasures or of the challenges faced by the woman artist ..."

"heated and alive ...This is not dusty scholarship but a work of passion."

"Ní Ghríofa's lyrical prose loops back on itself through many recurring images and sounds...this is noticeably a poet's first prose venture, and all the better for that."

"Billed as a genre-busting blend of 'autofiction, essay, scholarship, sleuthing and literary translation', the book is an extraordinary feat of ventriloquism delivered in a lush, lyrical prose that dazzles readers from the get-go ..."

"This incandescent, uncategorisable prose debut is...many things—a reimagining of an 18th-century life that combines scholarship with imaginative verve; an account of obsession and a meditation on the limits of biography; a memoir of post-feminist motherhood ..."

"Sections on Eibhlín and Art's relatives are one example where the pace flags."

"a kaleidoscopic book of 'homemaking' that centers the intuitive knowledge of the body in order to learn to live—again, again, and again."

"there is a crucial aspect of Ní Ghríofa's experience that she marginalizes throughout the memoir, and that is the hidden heart of it: how she translated the 'Caoineadh.' Although at the back of the book she gives us the poem in Irish Gaelic, her exciting translation, and a list of references for further reading, I wanted much more ..."

"This is a remarkable achievement."