“Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is not a poet of small ambition. He reaches after big subjects in the high style, and—mirabile dictu—he brings it off. There is something of Walt Whitman in McFadyen-Ketchum. He is a rhapsodist spinning words into a musical web. Line by line the poems pulse with verbal energy. His language is all meat and muscle. And yet, at ... Read morethe heart of the poems, one finds not simply a literary performance but a tender alertness to the world.”-Dana Gioia, author of Pity the Beautiful: Poems and Interrogations at Noon: Poem ""In the tradition, narratives march and lyrics fly. Ghost Gear is a book rich with narrative, but its primary impulse is always toward flight. And so McFadyen-Ketchum joins the ranks of practitioners of the vertical narrative: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, and Rodney Jones to name a few. 'I am a poet retelling a telling,' he writes, and the point of retelling is always to up the ante, to make the story more potent, more rewarding, and more dangerous. 'It is as if we are subjects in a grand / experiment,' one of his poems declares, and the poet's alembic refines its world down to basic substances, essences, and ash.""-Terry Hummer Show Less