Ghost Lights

The poems of Ghost Lights are ambitious and multi-textured narratives and lyrics, are steeped in the lore of cinema and pop culture, and above all seem to dwell in those liminal places where adolescent longing gives way to a hard-bitten and grown-up spirit of elegy. Keith Montesano is a tough and relentless poet, whose craft smanship is as impressive as his stance. Ghost Lights is an exceptionally noteworthy fi rst collection. -David Wojahn "Where // did this world / come from, and how did it appear?" Following Larry Levis, Keith Montesano discovers those fugitive moments when one life becomes another, when our angels arrive or depart. Ghost Lights presents a difficult and necessary vigil that enlarges the body of contemporary elegy, a welcome debut. -Jake Adam York Love, death, art, the love of art-glimpses fl ash past, shards assemble into mosaics of passion and pain, and the past won't steer clear of present. Keith Montesano's arresting Ghost Lights illuminates in its glow a vision of heartbreak and heroism, a rescue from the burning building and every other trap "somewhere between innocent // and harmful." This insightful poet imagines in lyrical beauty the terror and fascination of consuming flame. -Lisa Lewis Within Ghost Lights, the striking first collection by Keith Montesano, are all the elemental obsessions: violence and fi re and sex, in service of the sublime. Unafraid of ambition, free of pretension, these poems hold on to the heart and mind: they thrill, and enthrall, and, long aft er one has read them, they haunt. -Paul Guest