Imperfect Poverty

Poetry. Phillip Foss' sixth full-length book of poetry is a stark, stalking meditation on time, language, and landscape in which all three create "a harmonics / of disharmony" composing, decomposing, and recomposing "the journey of our unraveling." Jack Spicer contends that the poems in a book should "echo and reecho against each other," and the six poems comprising IMPERFECT POVERTY do just that, generating a "cacophony of spheres" in a poetic universe oscillating between the cycles of creation and destruction, birth and death that author the human and inhuman realms of being: "you are replicating / the condensation of every governable mind." Phillip Foss was founding director of the Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and editor of Tyuonyi magazine. He lives in northern New Mexico.