|
122 pages, 5 ¾ x 9 ¼ inches, 2007
$16.00 paper, 1-58729-621-7, 978-1-58729-621-5
“These hypnotic modulations of
form and feeling are, in the end, a kind of phenomenological trance
music, an Orphic drowse, a dream where we are shown ‘our shape as
waves.’ Reading this extraordinary book, we crest and topple and
dissolve. Earthly shocks and space rays pass through us, much like the
hidden forces that shuffle, here, the sentences, rework the words,
proving, poem to poem, line to line, the presence of love in the
world.”—Joseph Donahue
“Like none other, Tony Tost
conceals himself above the page (‘a bird over the battlefield’ of
poetry) and watches as the poem unfolds on its own terms, like a tree
contained in its seed. Tost also planted the seed, of course, and
what’s inside is ‘a balance in the realism’ that contains the bird’s
song, about to turn into the poet’s magisterial recitation. And in
Tost’s revolutionary title poem, ‘Complex Sleep,’ the revolving of day
and night becomes the inevitable ‘dear repetition’ of all we know: the
alphabet sings, literally a to z.”—David Rosenberg, coauthor, The Book of J (with Harold Bloom) and See What You Think: Critical Essays for the Next Avant-Garde
Complex Sleep,
Tony Tost’s ambitious second book of poems, leaps upward with an
astounding multiplicity of voices, utterances, and bursts. Each leap
marks a sure and precise entry into a world of images, ideas, and
sensations that is brand new—the true accomplishment of any poetic
work.
The octet of poems that compose Complex Sleep
comprises a complex organism, audacious in scope, swiping at meaning
via language as fragmented music. Tost takes on the problem of physical
shape, reorchestrates phrases according to the alphabet, and writes
himself into the hypnagogic state between waking and dreaming. Informed
by their own procedural constraints, these poems invent forms that tap
the unconscious poetic, the very complexity embodied in sleep. All the
while, Tost reforms utterance beyond the mere epistemology of much
contemporary poetry.
Devising an innovative formalism rather than concerning itself with discovering the what, Complex Sleep is about discovering how to say what needs to be said. Skip the opera, this book performs.
Tony Tost is a graduate student at Duke University. His first book, Invisible Bride, won the 2003 Walt Whitman Award. His poems have appeared in such literary journals as Hambone, No: a journal of the arts, Mandorla, Typo, Fence, Talisman, and LVNG. He edits the online poetry journal Fascicle.
Valentine
Remember a funny night
my family made a circle by and by
like standing on the shore a heart a visceral
thing. This moment my heart’s clear.
We’ll plant (my heart) a tree here.
My heart my heart my heart.
Is glad.
|
 |
