Trapping a Ghost, award-winning Irish poet Nessa O’Mahony’s second collection, explores the tensions that exist in the boundaries between past and present, flesh and spirit, poetry and narrative, inheritance and self-determination, family and artistic identity. In her poetry, ghosts exist alongside the living, reminding them of their ancestry. Stories abound, of civil war romances and heroic exploits, of old religions and new beliefs, of past love affairs, of future lives

About The Author
Nessa O’Mahony was born in Dublin in 1964. Her poetry has appeared in a number of Irish, UK and North American periodicals including Poetry Ireland Review, The Shop, nthpositon.com, The Stinging Fly, Agenda, Orbis, Staple, In Media Res (Canada), and the Atlanta Review and has also been broadcast by RTÉ radio. Her first poetry collection, entitled “Bar Talk”, was published by iTaLiCs Press in Dublin in 1999. She is editor of the online literary magazine, Electric Acorn (http://acorn.dublinwriters.org). She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2003 and is now undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Bangor. She was awarded a literature bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Éalaíon in 2004.