“Curley’s poetry calls in language’s magic, its errancy, the thing that ‘sounds itself outside itself,’ as he writes, in his moving poem to Robert Duncan. [ . . . ] Almost everything in these beautiful and savvy poems play at elusiveness, the old imprint in the sand replaced by a knotted, spectral presence equal and co-adjunct to an absence, ‘a ghost to its origin.’ Curley ‘sculpts shadows into substance,’ lovingly braiding emotion, humor and pain with independence and a sure authority.” —Michael Heller