"With this fine collection Gardner's work achieves what one poem describes as "beauty itself / taut against the half-life rendering." Human experience is the shadow cast by these poems, and not the other way around. "A wholeness ghost-licked or absent / gets caught in the machinery," Gardner observes, and yet these fearlessly unhaunted poems serve to backlight the ghosts that gather at their edges, that any reader brings to bear upon these stanzas' precise attentions." -G.C. Waldrep