Frank Paino reviews
Visiting Hours by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

I never believed in ghosts, but after reading Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum’s newest offering, Visiting Hours, I’ve changed my mind. The book takes as its sole focus the suicide (and aftermath) of the poet’s friend, Mary Interlandi, who leapt from the 7th floor of a Nashville parking garage in 2003. But Visiting Hours, which is a sustained elegy, a pitch-perfect wail, is haunted not so much by the shade of Mary as it is by Ketchum’s grief as he wrestles with the angels of “What If” and “If Only.” 

These lyric poems return, time and again, to the implacable witness of the moon which shone down on that garage rooftop just as it did on that 3AM college dorm room when Ketchum’s sister called to give him the terrible news.

Visiting Hours is a ravishing, relentless search for redemption.

In, “On the 1st Anniversary of Mary’s Death,” the poet writes:

...Mary’s still reaching for my thin face
With her thin hands. Listen, she keeps saying,

Say it. After me: “There was nothing I could do.”

Yet Ketchum struggles to acknowledge his blamelessness as he moves through his dark pilgrimage until, at last, in the book’s marvelous denouement, he reaches catharsis: “Thank you, my love, for saving my life.”

Visiting Hours dwells on those whose lives are forever changed in the wake of suicide. Ultimately, these brave, heart-laid-bare poems invite us to join the poet in letting Mary go--not so she can fall, but so we might rise with a renewed appreciation for life.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is an author, freelance editor, & ghostwriter. He is author of Visiting Hours and Ghost Gear; Acquisitions Editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books; and Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek.com, The Floodgate Poetry Series, and Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days. Learn more at AndrewMK.com.

Frank Paino has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a 2016 Individual Excellence Award from The Ohio Arts Council, a Pushcart Prize and The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature. He is the author of three books of poetry. His newest, Obscura, is available from Orison Books. (frankpaino.net)