WINNER OF THE IOWA POETRY PRIZE

*Shortlisted for Julie Suk Award, for best poetry book of the year by an independent press

*Finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book Award for best 2016 poetry book by an independent press

*Finalist for Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award for a book by a debut author

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*Reviews of System of Ghosts in: Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, storySouth,  New Orleans Review, The Gazette, NewPages, The Literary Review,  Birmingham Poetry Review, American Book Review, Stirring, Poet Lore

*Other Press: Ploughshares Blog, Lansing City PULSE, Clarkston News, Flagpole, Largehearted Boy, Adroit Journal, The Writer’s Center, The Red & Black, Ing Magazine, Michigan State University Honors College,  Michigan State University Alumni Magazine, Iowa State University Alumni VISIONS Magazine, The Sundress Blog, WORT 89.9 Madison 8 o’clock Buzz, Karen Craigo’s Poetry366, Chicago Reader, EvilCyclist’s blog, NewCity Lit, the Rumpus, Ponder Deeper blog,  Education World, Iowa City Press-Citizen, Bookforum, the Badger Herald, Sundress Lyric Essentials, The Writer’s Center First Personal Plural, Pints and Cupcakes Best Books 2016, Radio Free Nashville, “Everyday Poetry” with Sandee Gertz

*Poems from this book in: Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Rattle, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, diode, Blackbird, Poet Lore, Indiana Review

“Lindsay Tigue has, first and foremost, a curious mind: her poems are motored by information.  Bits of knowledge, gathered magpie-like, which others might consider trivia–the origins of the red and green on traffic lights, the different ways distant towns told time before railroads connected them, the composition of the asteroid Ceres–spur these poems toward startling personal and public insights.  As in the poetry of Robyn Schiff and the prose of Eula Biss, these esoteric facts, knit together carefully and with a gentle sense of mischievous humor, come to generalize about human suffering and hope.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, To Keep Love Blurry

“At once a record and a haunting, [Tigue’s] poetry invites us to consider the ways loss shapes us while also demanding we live in the present moment.” —Andrea Scarpino, American Book Review

“I find myself returning to this book again and again, a sincere phantom.”—Jenn Carter, Green Mountains Review

“System of Ghosts explores frontiers vanishing and gone. With a restless intelligence, Lindsay Tigue’s poems seek to know, to measure, to recover histories nearly lost. In these pages the world and the self are fantasized, destroyed, shared like an orange, abandoned like a rough draft, as unforgettable as the dead.”—Traci Brimhall,  Our Lady of the Ruins

“Lindsay Tigue’s work presents a vision, dominated by geography and natural history, uniquely paired with emotional imagination—the not-there-ness that coexists with its there-ness. This crush together, her feelings always a bit estranged from her, replaced by her gravitation to facts that she has remembered.”—Diane Wakoski, Bay of Angels

“I hope other readers will remember the name Lindsay Tigue and find or buy or borrow or read over somebody’s shoulder System of Ghosts.”—Kelly Cherry, StorySouth

“[Lindsay Tigue] insists we are built in some measure by what we lose, what we grieve, that part of being alive is being lonely.”—Molly McCully Brown, author of The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, New Orleans Review

“[Tigue’s] readers are also left with a more full-bodied experience than most debut poets achieve. Readers can only look forward to Tigue’s next book with anticipation for the continued attention she will give to living in a world weighted with what has come before.” –Jeremy Michael Reed, Stirring: A Literary Collection

“Place is of the utmost importance to writer Lindsay Tigue. She is deeply informed by the natural world, and the spaces she lives in create their own architecture in her work. . .”—Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes, author of The Sleeping World, Flagpole Magazine

“This poet reminds us that our world crumbles around and sometimes on top of us, and she leads us through landscapes that we don’t easily forget.”—Julie Brooks Barbour, Poetry Editor, Connotation Press

“I am amazed by the careful precision in Tigue’s work, which, when paired with her earnest questioning (of self and other), makes for an incredibly compelling read. So much of this book is attempting to construct meaning and memory in place, or environment, and what happens when that environment is not cared for any more, becomes abandoned.”—Gale Marie Thompson, author of Soldier On

“Tigue knows just how to bring her disparate sources and notions — and the ghosts of the past — together to craft work that gives wider context to the present moment.”—Rob Cline, The Gazette

“In her first book, Tigue has mastered a technique of taking facts. . .and using them as a springboard to wherever her imagination leads her. ” —Valerie Wieland, NewPages

“Ultimately, the strong but understated emotion in Tigue’s poems reminds us that the abandoned places are no longer barren. They are occupied with her presence.”—Dan Chu, poetry editor, Gulf Coast

“Carrying us from ‘abandoned places’ to unexplained losses and unconfirmed sightings, this promising first collection offers a thoughtful, if unsettling, exploration of the Zeitgeist by a poet ‘just / waiting for reasons to measure.'” — Debra Wierenga, Poet Lore

“I love trains, and I also adore ruins. . . It is rich with stuff, with detail, with nominative junk. It names names, chock-a-block, only to have it all melt and fade away. There is no better drama in such a condensed and pressured space. To have a lump of coal transformed into diamond and then, beyond that rock, into the elemental idea of crystalline and holy loss.” —Michael Martone, author of Winesburg, Indiana (on “Michigan Central Station Has Been Closed Since 1988”)

“In many ways, System of Ghosts is a collection about physical dislocation and migrant memory. . . . Lindsay Tigue brings us closer to understanding our own inventions, ruins, emotions, and the lost roots that leave us in despair and solace with the shadows of abandonment, and what they translate into in our psyche.” —Vibha Rana, The Literary Review

“In System of Ghosts, Lindsay Tigue details the way landscape speaks to isolation and personhood, how virtual and lived networks alter experience. She questions how built environments structure lives, how we seek out information within these spaces, and, most fundamentally, how we love.

Rooted in the personal, the speaker of this collection moves through society and history, with the aim of firmly placing herself within her own life and loss. Facts become an essential bridge between spatial and historical boundaries. She connects us to the disappearance of species, abandoned structures, and heartbreak—abandoned spaces that tap into the searing grief woven into society’s public places. There is solace in research, one system this collection uses to examine the isolation of contemporary life alongside personal, historical, and ecological loss. While her poems are intimate and personal, Tigue never turns away from the larger contexts within which we all live.”