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"The poems that make up In Ghostlight, a new collection from Ryan Wilson, meditate on the passing of time in light of the imaginative presence of absent times, both past and future, exploring the difficulty of being humanly present in the moment. Screens grab our attention and spirit us away; remembrance leads us toward repetitions of lost moments; idealism propels us toward utopian visions breeding disdain for the lives we have here and now. Formally and thematically, Wilson's poems navigate the tension between the desire for individual escape and the need for community, between hope and regret, between the spirit and the body, the eternal and the temporal. Rather than providing simplistic answers to these dichotomies, In Ghostlight reveals how each move in one direction is haunted by possibilities in the other. The progress of the book is a movement toward a union, or synthesis, of these diverging possibilities, allowing one to see each passing moment in the context of the eternal, and vice versa. Blending the autobiographical with the mythic, the contemporary with the ancient, the prose of twenty-first-century life with old and ancient verse-forms, these poems reveal, ultimately, that it's impossible to know anything without the past and without memory, that it's impossible to see fully what life, or hope, is without a spiritual katabasis, without seeing one's own experiences in ghostlight"--
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