“HUNGRY GHOSTS IS A BOOK in which words and pictures combine to make the absent pre­sent—that which is lost but may nevertheless return, the ghosts of our mind, supernatural powers. It is a phantasmagoria that gives voice to the repressed part of our existence: to nightmares and bad thoughts, to that which we desperately wish to banish or regain, even if only in effigies or words.

The title and structure are derived from the Petavatthu (“Ghost Stories”—“Hungry Ghost”, to be precise. In Pāli: peta; 隞苤—literally: “hungry spirit”), a Theravada Buddhist scripture of fifty-one poems evoking the dramatic stories of the spirits, the restless dead, their sufferings that result from bad actions performed in previous lives and, also, the possibility of redemption.

The book retains both the form and the content of the Petavattu, combining them with the resonance of epigraphs from the ancient world. So there are fifty-one poems composed by Gabriele Tinti in the form of epigrams that, in relation to Roger Ballen’s pictures, compel us to reckon with the mystery of our thirst for transcendence—with the desire for, and fear of, death and the beyond.

Reading Hungry Ghosts shows what it means to consort with ghosts—to speak with and compare ourselves to our forebears in the conviction that art and poetry are none other than that same quest and attempt.”