Complex Sleep, Tony Tost’s ambitious second book of poems, leaps upward with an astounding multiplicity of voices, utterances, and bursts. Each leap marks a sure and precise entry into a world of images, ideas, and sensations that is brand new—the true accomplishment of any poetic work.

The octet of poems that compose Complex Sleep comprises a complex organism, audacious in scope, swiping at meaning via language as fragmented music. Tost takes on the problem of physical shape, reorchestrates phrases according to the alphabet, and writes himself into the hypnagogic state between waking and dreaming. Informed by their own procedural constraints, these poems invent forms that tap the unconscious poetic, the very complexity embodied in sleep. All the while, Tost reforms utterance beyond the mere epistemology of much contemporary poetry.

Devising an innovative formalism rather than concerning itself with discovering the what, Complex Sleep is about discovering how to say what needs to be said. Skip the opera, this book performs.

“These hypnotic modulations of form and feeling are, in the end, a kind of phenomenological trance music, an Orphic drowse, a dream where we are shown ‘our shape as waves.’ Reading this extraordinary book, we crest and topple and dissolve. Earthly shocks and space rays pass through us, much like the hidden forces that shuf?e, here, the sentences, rework the words, proving, poem to poem, line to line, the presence of love in the world.”—Joseph Donahue