This to me seems a crucial, exemplary moment in Complex Sleep, framing it as an elaborate scrapbook aiming to preserve “what the lad has collected” and to take a measure of the balance. The sequence titled “An Emperor’s Nostalgia” is dedicated to Tony’s wife, Leigh, and we can follow this preservationist thread through its declarations of fealty, so fierce that they come to seem like prayers against the past that bears us away and the future that bears down upon us: “This is the end of terror” and “We are not for the flies” and “You cannot lose to dying/ If your case is love.” And we follow it especially through the book’s long titular sequence, whose circuitous history––first, Tony rewrote or reconsidered various sentences and assertions from older work into a new prose poem, and then arranged the “significant syntactical units” of that prose poem into the alphabetically ordered index that appears here––makes for formal fireworks and a great spirit of play, as the index’s alphabetical arrangement shapes the propositions’ meanings and contexts. But I think the real power of the poem lies not with the fireworks, but the yawning existential sky that is their background; the great and nameless yearning from which the urge to preserve arises. Was it the narrator of Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers who cried over his cut hair, consecrated his fingernail clippings? Isn’t a line of poetry just the same bodily emulsion, universal yet profoundly specific–– and might not a worshipful man feel a pang of something like despair at the prospect of any of it slipping away? Might not one strive to make a record, a song suspended in, not swept away through, time’s windy passage?

The books of poetry I like best seem to illuminate a truth that attains universality by being exquisitely personal, where each line seems an instance of the author’s mind momentarily seeing itself clearly. Usually this comes through intuitively, although in this case, I can verify the hypothesis. Like his poems, Chris’s personal energy is quizzical and attentive. Tony’s is paradoxically strong and gentle, a bird’s heart in a bear’s sinew. And Ken Rumble’s is giddy and carnival-esque, implying fireworks, ringing bells, flashing lights, arcs of speed and force. Key Bridge, his debut book, follows suit. These poems are radiant sprays of typography: the lines slalom down the pages in serpentine ranks; unclosed brackets and parentheses hang like bursting rockets; dashes slash out staccato music; words splatter into painterly constellations of letterforms. But preceding all of this, the book opens with two concise lines that comprise an internal manifesto of sorts: “breath. )/ Now )[.]” The poems must be living things, and they must unfold in the eternally expanding moment of the present.