Released 15 July 2026 // Poetry Pamphlet // 48 pages
 
'Raising Ghosts is a powerful, courageous gathering of poems, charting a childhood shaped by poverty and the gravitational pull of a mercurial mother – “A fathomless black hole / The planet of love we orbited”. In poems marked by subtle but destabilising shifts in tone, Michelle Diaz excavates the long afterlife of loss: the child in the isolation ward, the abandoned house with “three toddlers [who] opened empty cupboards”, the adult woman still searching the rubble of herself for the mother, and for the child who once lived there.
 
Moving from the raw elegy of its first half into the fractured relationships and psychic hauntings of adulthood, the poems ask what we do with the ghosts that raise us, returning to what remains after a mother’s absence has reshaped the world. Raising Ghosts is a stunning meditation on grief, survival and the enduring, echoing presence of the past.'
 
— Emilie Jelinek
 
'Ghosts of the past and the present haunt this unsettling collection by Michelle Diaz. There is a refreshing originality to Diaz’s writing that I love – a beautifully odd mixture of concrete detail, forensic observation of family life coupled with surreal imagery – a mother is both ‘A Victorian wardrobe packed with 1960s kaftans’ and ‘the Big Bang’ and in a later poem the daughter wears her ‘like a hoodie.’ This is a collection where the domestic never feels safe or pedestrian. It speaks of the trauma handed down through the generations and of making the best of what you have – though it never feels depressing or bleak. These poems spoke to me – one wounded heart to another.'
 
— Julia Webb