Complex Sleep, Tony Tost鈥檚 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鈥攖he 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.
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鈥檚 clear.
We鈥檒l plant (my heart) a tree here.
My heart my heart my heart.
Is glad.
鈥淭hese 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 鈥榦ur shape as waves.鈥 Reading this extraordinary book, we crest and topple and dissolve. Earthly shocks and space rays pass through us, much like the hidden forces that shuf铿俥, here, the sentences, rework the words, proving, poem to poem, line to line, the presence of love in the world.鈥濃擩oseph Donahue
鈥淟ike none other, Tony Tost conceals himself above the page (鈥榓 bird over the battlefield鈥 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鈥檚 inside is 鈥榓 balance in the realism鈥 that contains the bird鈥檚 song, about to turn into the poet鈥檚 magisterial recitation. And in Tost鈥檚 revolutionary title poem, 鈥楥omplex Sleep,鈥 the revolving of day and night becomes the inevitable 鈥榙ear repetition鈥 of all we know: the alphabet sings, literally a to z.鈥濃擠avid Rosenberg, coauthor, The Book of J (with Harold Bloom) and See What You Think: Critical Essays for the Next Avant-Garde
