Imperfect Poverty

Phillip Foss’ imperfect poverty—his sixth full-length book and his second from Singing Horse Press (The Ideation, 2004)—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.