Invisible Bride: Poems

by Tony Tost

Tost, Tony, Invisible Poems

Genres: Poetry

57 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2004

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

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't so much a review as some notes I jotted while reading--things Invisible Bride struck me as especially concerned with:

-Problems of measurement

-Belief systems (often VS. problems of measurement)

-Family/self-making, re-making, -history-making

-Desire(?) for capture: airports, mixed tape, film, film, airport, video, written, portrait

Also, I suggest attention to the epigraph, and reading from cover to cover, start to finish. Good individual poems made stronger by their progression, interaction with and echoes of each other.

[Tom C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tost is a talented prose poet. He's writing scripts now instead of poems. I hope he returns to poems soon.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This was an amazing experience. When I read it out loud I really felt it.

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Invisible Bride is a poetic game as much as it is a book. Filled with surreal, shifting, prose poems, this collection invites you into the mind of a speaker and then forces you through its labyrinthine corridors with little to no guidance and, at the end of it, no clear idea of what you just read except for a vague sense that it must have meant and that you understood at the time. I don't know if the poems were "about" something--on the whole--although they were about many things. They were about a man who knows a woman named Agnes, growing up, the seasons, parenting, loneliness, desire. They were about eavesdropping, and jackals, and shadows, and war. Most of all, if the book is about anything, it is about how our lives fail to be "about" things but still manage to have meaning. These poems were conversations, and they didn't go anywhere any more than conversations do, but being unable to draw a neat moral from them on the first reading is, at least for me, no reason to write them off as meaningless. I can't get a moral from my life on first reading either.
There is a remarkable effect where the poems both make more sense in isolation and as a collection. As a collection, they make sense in their failure to make sense, in isolation, the smaller (to a point) you cut them down, the more straightforward they seem. Part of this is that it is unclear how many poems are in the book. One in six parts, each in more parts? Six, each in parts? Forty-four, some of which have titles, some of which do not, and some of which have further numbered parts? Something between six and forty-four, only counting as separate when there is a big section number or a title at the top of the page? What this means is that it is never certain whether or not something is missed or whether two bits that I can't connect are actually separate poems. So you reach the poem/section "Crossing a Bridge Sweetens the Body" and read

My shadow is down there in the water, making soft little noises. I was born holding a demon's harnd. This is why I always enter a room dancing. My song has alternated between the song of a dog tied to a post and the song of linear subordination. I'm working on a new song. It goes: "I won't hurt you, I won't hurt you, I won't hurt you."

and it is not clear how it relates to the poem/section immediately prior, with no title:

It's like waking up and kissing a mirror good morning. The challenge is finding a reason. One approach is holding onto the ball, staying in bounds, waiting for the clock to run out. There are lots of reasons strutting around, flapping their wings, but they are often stupid reasons. Entire towns sell their souls for any number of reasons; people die for one, maybe two reasons. I have a pet chicken. Echo. He is my favorite chicken. Had him since I was a child (first chicken best chicken). The night is a black moth. A spoon grazing my lips. The night is a black mouth. I have killed my favorite chicken.The night is a black month or a red month. It's late. A man passes a door three or four times before he realizes it's the way out.

Both of these make their own kind of sense, but it is not clear if or how they relate, and a lot of their sense requires accepting the odd or impossible at face-value to begin with. I like that about this collection. I like being asked to take strange occurrences at face value before I am permitted to attempt to see them as allegory or metaphor for the more easily comprehensible. And Invisible Bride asks that at every turn.

[Alfredo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I fought to encounter meaning to it. I had it since the very first poem I read on the net, I just didnt knew what it was. As the title say it, invisible bride. I dint knew if I was getting married to it. Or someone else was. But it says it so. To be in love with something invisible. It may become "visible" if you kiss it. I did so. It feels new, it feels fresh, it feels provoking smiles on it's sense of humor. I will recomend it deeply.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really, any book with the poem "Unawares" is going to be a book to take note of. I feel that there were some of the poems that weren't given the space to be fully realized, however, the fresh imaginative spaces I read in here are very welcome.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been very influential for me.

[nasrin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I kept having the sensation of having pieces of my subconscious pulled out from under me while reading these poems--this was a wretchedly wonderful feeling.

[Nothing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost my introduction to the "young american avant". Was surprised to see on rereading that it hasn't dulled with time. Very smart. Moving.

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

the american sublime

[Frank (Craig) Caudill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was floored wwhen i read this

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

YES.

[Lorenzo Sivilotti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Half-baked, inconsistent, and frustrating; vacillating between essay and poem, purple and crude prose, these poems lack visual, thematic, or linguistic connective tissue, with good lines or ideas as the exception, not the rule.
3/10

[Konrad · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Did you know that Rick James and Neil Young played together in a band called The Mynah Birds? Did you know that Thomas Jefferson was once given a 1,235-pound hunk of cheese, giving us the term 'the big cheese?' That sleepwalkers are not allowed in the armed services because of the threat they pose when they have access to dangerous equipment and are unaware of what they are doing? I have razors hidden throughout my room, so I'm curious as to what will happen when all the somnambulists get in here." (19)

[Katie]

Should poetry be an expansion of one's consciousness? Or should it be a more clear understanding of the world one already knows?

Well, it should be both; an exquisite rendering of each.

What a work of creative genius this is.

[Catherine Carberry · Rating 4 out of 5]

" A conversation represents not so much a break in solitude, but a newer form of solitude, a revision of the logic of solitude."

[Aryo Wasisto · Rating 3 out of 5]

GREAT! kejujuran adalah segalanya, teman...

[Carrie]

Tinder date bought this and then gave it to me, so I guess I'm reading this now.