“Ghosts and Fashion” is a visualization of a poem by the same name by world-renown poet Elaine Equi (The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry). The short tells the simple, lyrical story of a new ghost who now needs to figure out what to wear in the afterlife!

Part of this year’s Visible Poetry Project, a New York City poetry-cinema initiative that screens thirty filmmaker/poet teams each day of National Poetry Month. Past participants have included Neil Gaiman, Tato Laviera, and many more.

Director’s Statement

When I was accepted into the 2018 Visible Poetry Project, the executive producer assigned to me, Christina Ellsberg, introduced me to Elaine Equi, who had agreed to participate in this year’s round of poem visualizations. Because of the ghostly nature of the short film I applied with (called “Lara”), Christina thought Elaine and I would make a great pairing. And boy was she correct! I immediately fell in love with the poem visualized here. It’s fun, it’s quirky, but in the end the words hit me with a sense of something acutely dramatic. So I took that feeling and ran with it, creating what you see here now!