I love the way Conley creates these series of what I want to call visual poems, only by default--only because there is no proper designation for a novel form. [In The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine] we experience juxtaposed images of historical and not-so-historical personages cleanly engraved and then suddenly disappearing in a xeroxial fog of reproduction, a Banquo's feast of mirrors. These visual-textual series allow Conley to create the visual analogues of the serial poem, and into these delicious confections he works some of the best quotes in the English language (and many others, translated) to create an almost Midrashically complex, anachronistic interplay between image and text that often leads the mind to question the impossible interface that occurs daily--i.e., to ask how it is that words and objects could ever even come to a sort of harmony in the first place? It begins to seem beyond us. And beyond us is the metaphysical. So the circle runs, chasing its tail like the cat in that Siouxsie and the Banshees song. —W. B. Keckler, author of Sanskrit of the Body