Basil King's There Are No Ghosts There Are Portraits is co-published by Pinsapo and Lost & Found, introduced by Ammiel Alcalay, and edited with an afterword by Öykü Tekten.
 
"Basil King's set of portraits are as widening rings in the pool of human circumstance in which desire and the creative strike for freedom is the stone at the center."
                                                                                                                     — Kimberly Lyons
 
"[...] each of the texts included here — taking up figures as disparate as Billy the Kid, poets Samuel Greenberg and Isaac Rosenberg, painters Velazquez, van Dyke, Rubens, Soutine, Modigliani, Chagall, and so many others — seem to have been poured through Olson’s alembic, his “Special View of History,” as Basil punctiliously records and juxtaposes the facts “that matter,” so “fact can be fable again.” Like the vast visual and textural vocabulary of his paintings, Basil King’s latest textual landscapes portray worlds torqued into collision and relation, close to the bone and heart, close to our own felt ways of knowing. Work so condensed to its essential elements is all too rare, and the formal effect of these writings is overwhelming. Basil King’s There Are No Ghosts, There Are Portraits is a treasure that deserves both our attention and study."
                                                                                                                      — Ammiel Alcalay
 
PRAISE FOR THERE ARE NO GHOSTS THERE ARE PORTRAITS
 
I love reading Basil King’s poetic histories because they connect time and place and people in unexpected ways that I find delightful. In Basil’s new collection, There Are No Ghosts, There Are Portraits, the first piece, “Soutine, Modigliani, Chagall,” makes perfect sense because it begins at the beginning of the lives of these artists, who were nurtured by loving mothers who gave them the chutzpah to be pioneering Jews accepted into the French art world at a time rife with anti-semitism. Not only did Soutine, Modigliani, and Chagall participate, they prospered and, as Basil suggests, paved the way for others. 
                                                                                                                  —Don Yorty's Blog