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
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More About the Author
Keith Montesano is the author of the poetry collection Ghost Lights (Dream Horse Press, 2010). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, American Literary Review, Third Coast, Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and currently lives with his wife in New York, where he is a PhD Candidate in English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Remarkable Debut,
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This review is from: Ghost Lights (Paperback)
An exemplary collection by the young and supremely talented Keith Montesano. The poems collected herein explore the pscyhological, spiritual, and physiological repurcussions and limits of elegiac speech, poesy, rhetoric, and shape. The poet, while in control of his world and the life he spins from the crumbs of love and death, never--and yet always--succombs to the beauty of language and image above all else.
Comparing and contrasting the remnants of movie scenes, lines, and character motivations with often heart-breaking and violent news-stories, Montesano creates a world unsettled and unsettling, a world where cinema invades and evades his speaker's pysche and the murders, kidnappings, and unsolved crimes from the back of America's newspapers add texture to a grizzled/grizzly voice. These poems ache with a clarity of mind and glitter with an adventurous linguistic spirit, but never once will one of Montesano's speakers admit psychological defeat without simultaneously admitting and exemplifying a strength of spirit found rarely in contemporary poetry. Elegiac in turns and celebratory always, Montesano's poems sing the day as they envelope the night and always in-between is the language lit from within like firefly cupped between palms. A must read for all poetry fans. Buy your copy now!
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poetry with a cinematic bent,
By Casey Pegram (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Ghost Lights (Paperback)
I come to Keith Montesano's work through cinema, rather than poetry, as I'm versed much more in the former. Anyone who loves the delicate natural beauty of Terrence Malick's films will be at home here - but Montesano's work is also rooted in something darker and more elegiac, a perpetual sense of tragedy and loss interwoven with visual splendor. A wonderful first collection.
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