Besides imbuing Tony’s poems with a massive breadth, these extreme contrasts suggest a sort of spiritual schism––language as a stitched seam attempting to reunify something cloven. Like Chris, Tony is interested in waves, which move in one direction only, and seems to lock oars against them, pushing backwards toward a point of origin even as he’s borne ever forwards: “Come home/ your father’s birthday is today[.]” “Squint” is the book’s second poem, a sequence of self-contained yet interconnected sentences, each quartered by comma-bound caesurae. Each is a sort of baroque aphorism unto itself, radiating a densely interior and subjective meaning: “But who has a parent, dark pools of blood, if a truth is uttered, there are no hours.” But taken together, a broader interconnectivity emerges. “Squint” begins with a creation myth––“Far from being, the music is already there, near the beginning, nearer everything.”––and ends with a kind of eschatological prayer. “The mercy of winds, the navel of an ape, the end of flesh, it was the mercy.” This sweeping scope is typical of Tony’s work, as is the sense of inestimable loss it entails––note the conflation of “the beginning” and “everything” and how far from both we’ve traveled.

“Imaginary Synonyms” and “Squint” are supplicated, prayerful poems, which kneel inside their own austere architecture. The tone superficially changes with “World Jelly” (previously published as a chapbook by Effing Press), which burns that austere architecture to the ground. According to the book’s notes, “World Jelly” was inspired by the poems of Chris Vitiello (“put this poem on your shoulder[,]” it commands, as befits a poem that is both Vitiello-redolent and engaged in an act of parroting), the lyrics of Robert Pollard and Bob Dylan, and Jack Kerouac’s haiku. It is a frothing mutant of a poem, blurring the line between aphorism and non-sequitur, replacing the first two poems’ quiet beatitudes with lewd innuendoes (“You will receive yours/ beneath the blanket”) and stentorian commands (“Asshole serpent/ write this down”). “Do not turn into me[,]” Tony warns, as if acknowledging the slippery slope of the poetic nihilism implicit in this “self-portrait with/ spiders in the grapes[.]” It appears to be a desecration of the lyric, but is actually a different, more belligerent kind of consecration: “Here I keep a record/ of what can be accepted/ what the lad has collected/ in the balance[.]”