Subtitle Poems
Publisher Banango Editions
Release Date 2015-07-20
Author(s) Weston Cutter (MFA '09)
Summary Weston Cutter’s Regulation Ghost reveals its spirit in the first poem: “from here/I exhume the past”. With a glittering pickax, Cutter clears away the sediment from sentiment, and shows us what lives in the bright “flickering reels” of his memory – the search for, loss, and finding again of love, beauty, youth, and home. The past life/life passed in these poems never seems like one lamented for, but one that is used as a tool to locate oneself in the present, and “for where into the narrative to stitch myself”, using experience as a way to find meaning in the present “even if it all meant nothing”.  This collection is full of so much gorgeous wisdom, energy, and “music where you least expect” with lines that build upon themselves the way the past builds upon itself: a natural stacking that could feel claustrophobic if it wasn’t infused with so much agility and light. The Regulation Ghost of these poems acts as a divine pulley that yanks us back and forth between what we have and have yet to experience, between the “nothing…[we] wake to” and the “hopes that have taken names”. After reading these poems, you will see that Cutter, like “the lightning of the living has left/deep black burns on the inside of your mind”. – Meghan Privitello, author of A New Language For Falling Out of Love