Stephen Frech’s great strength in The Dark Villages of Childhood is not the elegant metaphor, though he has some of these, but the uncanny selection of mundane details that startle by their rightness. In “The Ghost of Him,” a 10-part elegy for a childhood friend who died young, Frech calls upon every sense we own to evoke a boy’s world that is remarkably real and unmistakably American. Don’t let the “dark” in his title fool you: his images shimmer.

~Gary Miranda

Sweet childhood reminiscence and the dark music of elegy are powerful co-presences in Stephen Frech’s lovely collection. Underneath its clear surface run smart strategic moves and deep emotional currents. This book’s a keeper! Read it once and it will demand your company again and again.

~Albert Goldbarth

Frech is a poet of dark spaces: the mysterious, dimly-lit memories of childhood and the uncomfortable fear of falling into the unknown as “light spill[ing] like fine grain between the cracks.” This poet walks a subtle tightrope between nightmare and actuality, childhood and adulthood, real and surreal, “desperate to say a thing / for which there is no language, only likeness.”

~Kristin Abraham