With finely crafted and original language, the poems in If Not For These Wrinkles of Darkness explore the acts of observation, perception, and artistic creation in their relationships to one another. The specific moments captured in Frech’s poetry are rich with imagery. They resonate with the power of human emotion and conflict. The voice, the variety of music, the recurring themes, and the events of Rembrandt’s life, all work together throughout the book to produce a unity of vision, a stance toward experience and belief that is universal at its heart. These strong, evocative poems linger and last.

~Pattiann Rogers

With the expertise of a scholar and the empathy of a brother, Frech has created a book (and recreated a time, a place, a person) that becomes a happy wedding of deconstruction and tender homage. Widely embracing, in the spirit of Rembrandt’s own work, Frech’s series extends from a procuress’s randy babble to the humming of Mary on her way to the manger, from the chemistry of paint to its immaterial glories—and always with the faith that “everything has a breath / and you can hear it.” This is a lovely book, smart and rhapsodic and comic and broken and deep.

~Albert Goldbarth

There is a broad ambition behind this book, and Stephen Frech has the skill and imagination to see it through. He gives us Rembrandt’s life as the painter himself might: immersed in the world, rich with light and shadow, fully fleshed.

~Don Bogen

In If Not For These Wrinkles of Darkness Stephen Frech enters a mind, a time, and a place so distant one would have thought them irredeemable. He gives remarkable texture and dimension to the artist and the man in these smart and compassionate poems.

~Jane Mead