Ghostlier Demarcations

In the powerful and thought-provoking poems that make up Ghostlier Demarcations, Richard Stuecker establishes ethereal lines that mark the shadowy boundaries between the secular, spiritual, and profound aspects of our lives. Stuecker then masterfully blurs those lines as he moves from observations of daily life ("On evening walks, I rediscover / where I live, whom I live among"), to reflections on a life lived ("Must I meet everyone I knew alive?") to meditations on existence and identity ("I am a tourist in a life-long search for connection to myself"). Stuecker lulls readers into feeling a sense of security in the certainty of their own identities, and then holds mirrors-in the forms of Mark Rothko's monolithic paintings ("pulling me into my center, like a remembered dream")-to their faces so that they have no choice but to stare deeply into their own reflections and confront who they really are.

- Kip Knott, author of Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on

Richard Stuecker's Ghostlier Demarcations bears the marks of pandemic, of a consciousness moving through a world heavy with hauntings. These poems come to anchor in the land, in memory rich with its seasonal shifting, arrival of signs, philosophical questions as we move among the living and the dead. Like a film in the dream space between, the poems in Ghostlier Demarcations interrogate religious shadows, moments passing, the "mirror maze" of the everyday woven into the mystery, and ultimately, the artform itself into which the poet vanishes.

- Doug Cole

The poems of Ghostlier Demarcations search for the still point beneath which great movement occurs - a moment in an experienced life when "we always turn / toward where we come from, / against chill reminiscence / rising less and less, more and more / we lock the door to still the night." Here we find the importance in the immediacy of simple but deep connections, such as friendships made and sustained over coffee, the passing of a mother, the daily reacquaintance with a neighborhood turned stranger. In a meditative approach, Stuecker seeks a more direct and eternal connection with the world through mediums such as memory and the contemplation of Mark Rothko paintings. These poems search for a sustainable resolution to such contradictions in a time when death looms ever larger: "Death quickens my search / for connection to compassion: all in this moment / a possibility, a promise to lift us like blue herons, / wide wings spread against the sun."

- Joshua Bridgwater Hamilton