Complex Sleep

by Tony Tost

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. 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. discovering the what, Complex Sleep is about discovering how to say what needs to be said. Skip the opera, this book performs.

Genres: Poetry

122 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

I'm the author of two full length poetry books, Complex Sleep (Iowa 2007: Kuhl House Poets series) and Invisible Bride (LSU 2004: Walt Whitman Award), and one chapbook, World Jelly (Effing 2005). I'm currently writing a prose book on Johnny Cash's first American Recordings album, which will be published by Continuum Books in their 33 1/3 series.

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I should just put all poetry (at least the poetry I like) onto my currently reading shelf, because the poetry I like I never finish reading. Complex Sleep I am technically currently reading, as I haven't yet read every word, but it didn't take me long to realize its inexhaustibility. I had read World Jelly as a separate chap, and didn't particularly like it; it was just kind of beginningless endless tossed around words, but now I see how it fits so well into Complex Sleep as a whole. And I would call Complex Sleep one poem, rather than "poems" as the cover states, because all the contents seem to echo and re-echo off of each other creating a kind of high-frequency yet easy going din that draws your mind and heart out into numerous paths of sound and thought. For all its complexity, and obvious learning and almost the-whole-bag-of-tricks experimentation, there is an easy going cool and domestic tenderness threading its way through the entire book. And I don't even know what to say about the long section entitled "Complex Sleep", it's like an everywhere spreading neural map of the consciousnesses of lyrical cerebral (even romantic) word organisms continuously arising from the complex sleep of the page.

[Matt Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried.

[C.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A FAVORITE book by a FAVORITE poet.
"...For me
the challenge was as I saw it
to reveal as mere sentences
that which I thought I had become."

The blurb on the back by Joseph Donahue states that these poems are "trance music, an Orphic drowse," and I guess the word "drowse" doesn't sit inside me, as a reader of the poems, as I'm anything but sleepy reading them. I'm very awake, whether "sleep" is in the title of not, the book DEFIES "sleep" as only the best poems would. The poems contradict the title, and that makes me happy!

CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

What do I really think of this? I think Tost proposes a project for himself, and executes that project flawlessly. I have significant issues with the notion that he would take all the lines from his previous poems, arrange them alphabetically, and after some light editing call it an abecedarian poem. But it fits with the project--namely, that language can be left to its own devices (or is inevitably left to its own devices), and in the process of that, it arrives at a new meaning. I like Tony Tost.

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

complex and playful and philosophical and alt-country. burst bubbles. fashionable second and third kingdoms. mirrors on waters . . . love like consciousness . . . there is no way to blurb this . . . read and re-read for lifetime!!!

[Brian Foley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is no lie, this shit is complex. A welcome tangle though.

[solidad · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complex, surreal, stream of consciousness tour-de-force. A definite read if you're interested in authors who push the boundaries of contemporary poetics.

[Carrie]

A total major metrics thing going on here. Kind of disturbing it makes me feel like crying. But I do kind of like the so past tense its future thing.