“Why tunnel back along the grooved slate of memory?” asks Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum in “Slag,” one of the poems in his debut collection, Ghost Gear. It’s a question he seems to ask, in one way or another, in many of the twenty-four poems here, most of which revisit his Nashville boyhood through a rough mix of tender feeling and powerful, occasionally violent imagery. McFadyen-Ketchum’s work excavates the past almost compulsively, sometimes seeking revelation but more often simply to experience the bittersweet pleasure of remembering.
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Ghost Gear was a finalist for the 2014 Miller Williams Poetry Prize.