It’s as if this unraveling of the sequences and durations implicit in language (“Duration masks condition/ Watch the whens”) is a deflected attempt at coming to grips with the sequences and durations of life itself. While it’s tempting to read the book as a complex metaphor for intellection, Chris says: “Each wave regressing affects/ the breaking of the next wave/ This is not metaphorical/ This/ is about waves/ This is easy.” He knows that the world is already a metaphor for itself, and the only deceptive statement here is “this is easy.” Nothing in Chris’s poems seems to come easy; it’s hard work to “establish the minimum and then have just more than it.” Irresponsibility encourages the reader to mistrust language; its paradox is that you come away from it trusting the author, who is not a deconstructive maze-maker, but a guide trying (and heroically, inevitably failing) to lead us out of the maze we enter the moment we try to communicate with each other, or try to make sense of our own lives with only the most rudimentary tools at our disposal.

Tony Tost is the editor of Fascicle (to my mind, the best and most ambitious journal of poetics to hit the Internet in recent years) and the author, before writing Complex Sleep, of the Whitman Prize-winning book of prose poems, Invisible Bride. It was via the questing, Rimbaudian prose of Invisible Bride that I got to know and love Tony’s work, and it took a minute for me to get used to the mostly-lineated poems of Complex Sleep. The first few lines of the poem that opens the book, “Imaginary Synonyms” is a fair description of Tony’s transition from prose to verse: “Eventually we take it apart/ dissecting it palate by plate/ only to get smaller[.]” The oneiric weavings that comprised Invisible Bride are here intact, but they are more dispersed, more porously connected, and more fearless, unencumbered by the safety net of narrative logic. Tony’s verse is a marvel of extreme contrasts. We feel at once amid and above his psychic landscapes: “Up on Breeze : for what is isolation/ but Song in and not via Wind? We are still in the wind.” His lines have the grace of verse, but the weight of prose; a strange combination of lightness and heaviness, like anchors sailing easily through the air, or feathers clanging down like anvils. Careful enjambments slam home gossamer lines with unaccountable force: “[G]rief may be rotting half my brain/ but I remember all of your face/ faintly.” Tony’s voice manages simultaneously to boom like a god’s, and to tremble like a small, hurt bird’s.