“The Shadowgraph offers graceful and intelligent meditations on the vagaries of memory, film, family history, and emerging gender, sexual, and personal identity. Deftly weaving Hollywood glamour with recollections of his own past, Cihlar explores the way memory and film work to reconstruct (or recreate) our lived and imagined events. This is a very fine, technically dexterous, moving collection of poems.”
— Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them

“In the tradition of books exploring American life through film, the cruelties of family life, and the experience of being gay in contemporary culture, The Shadowgraph is a glorious collection of poems! Cihlar arrives in full voice that simply stands larger and fresher with each poem. Each one is satisfying, original, and honest.” — Jonis Agee, author of The River Wife: A Novel

“These poems have chunks of John Ashbery-like inscrutability and pinches of the movie-crazed Frank O’Hara. . . .The second half of the book consists of poems under titles of movies starring Stanwyck. Wonderfully witty as viewing companions, they function on other levels, too. . . . Employing first-, second-, and third-person pronouns, Cihlar twines intriguingly into and out of movies, probing them for pathos and comedy, opposites and doubles. Cihlar convinces us that we want our screen idols to bestow us with emotional takeaways, however fleeting or mysterious. . . . It’s fun when Cihlar unleashes his unguarded fanboy, as in ‘The Furies’: ‘When Stanwyck casts aside pearls/ for diamonds, it changes the air/ in the theater. When she rides her horse/ to the squatter’s fort/ and warns her Mexican lover/ she wrings the neck of eloquence.’ Pop culture meets pathos in The Shadowgraph, a stirring paean to movie idols who flicker across the screen and sometimes show up in the mirror.”
— Claude Peck