Ghost Wrestling, Roger Weingarten’s eighth and most exciting collection to date, further demonstrates his mastery at drawing the trappings of daily life – whether rodents in the basement, the Summer Olympics on television, or a fairway sniper – into the sphere of mystery and personal revelation. Weingarten has a sly way with language and an unerring sense of how to weave the strands of experience into the fabric of epiphany. This is writing of artful restlessness and profound yet edgy wisdom, telling stories whose endings constantly subvert our comforting expectations – writing, said The Nation, that “is unlike anything else in contemporary poetry.”
In a polite age, Roger Weingarten’s poems are resolutely impolite; they allow for the snarl and the howl, for rancor and jealousy, lust and resentment and regret laced with dark laughter.… His edgy voice [is] an unmistakable presence in contemporary poetry. — Mark Doty
An intensely personal, frankly autobiographical and domestic rendering of the way our figurative ghosts — lovers, friends, family, and children — have power to torment and bless us… These poems elevate ordinary torment and bless us… These poems elevate ordinary domestic relations to the level of myth. — Douglas Glover, The Book Show
Musical, funny, terrifying poems of relationships in which the domestic is linked to the freal, the demotic to the fantastic… Weingarten writes like none other. — Alice Fulton