Invisible Bride: Poems Book

Tony Tost's exhilarating poetry debut defies conventional description. Like a fantastic film, a feverish delirium, or a dream state, these prose poems use an experimental lexicon of imagery that goes beyond anything typically poetic. Tost's point of departure is the loss of the Other that makes the I: Agnes. And in a sort of coming-of-age soliloquy song, he meditates on a range of topics: fatherhood, childhood, identity, poetry. Together his poems express the unburdening of consciousness, a consciousness that contains the likes of Blake, Italo Calvino, Allen Grossman, and Frank Stanford, among others (including Tost himself).

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Invisible Bride, by Chapel Hill, N.C.-based poet Tony Tost, starts with the fact that "The man's Vision begins with the child's Sob" ("There is no temptation to call this another form of surrender") and passes through myriad prose blocks loaded with information, prayer, diaristic narrative, obsessive footstep-counting, a "swan costume" and other lenses for glimpsing an ethereal other. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.