Ghost Gear

"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 the heart of the poems, one finds not simply a literary performance but a tender alertness to the world." --Dana Gioia
"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
"A provocative and rewarding collection that represents urban and natural relationships as the poet views them: circular, richly populated, often dangerous, and certainly worth attentive reading."
--Pleiades