Gary Stein’s Touring the Shadow Factory is a meditation on time, memory, and loss—from the ghosts of the past to “the soft blur of [the] future.” In poems both precise and masterfully understated, Stein explores the human condition of being in many times at once, carrying our childhoods with us as we age, expectant about what might be coming: “Each night the next miracle.”    

—Maggie Smith, author of The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison and Good Bones

What tours, what shadows in what factory are here, in these haunting poems of memory, love, and legend? Stein's poems focus on the father, now a shade, a gifted, patient carver and craftsman who "knew the soul of wood" and long ago brought his young son into his workshop. The poet-son, now grown, pursues the craft of words, of story-making, of would not wood, with kindred, altered skills. And wonders and blesses, in his turn, what shadows and what skills, what callings, his own now-grown sons will now pursue.   

—Judith McCombs, author of The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New 

Gary Stein is a poet in the spirit of Blake, Frost, and William Carlos Williams. In Stein’s poetry, the ideas are always in little things that touch larger things, and the world is revealed in a squirrel dying, a car being washed, a clock falling from a wall. To read poems such as “The Cremationist’s Day Off,” “Travels in Time,” and “On My 50th Birthday” is to know you are in the presence of a poet who is a master of language., and who can use it to express the home truths of existence. Touring the Shadow Factory is a magnificent book. 

—Miles David Moore, author of The Bears of Paris and Rollercoaster