Poetry. "In his remarkable magazine 'Tyuonyi,' Phillip Foss is realizing a vital new synthesis of seemingly disparate tendencies in North American poetry. Foss's collection of poems, THE COMPOSITION OF GLASS, achieves something of the same effect. Foss's poems, especially the long sequence called 'Virga. Icy Gate,' are possessed of an elegiac resistance that is ruminatively intoxicating. Make no mistake about it: Foss's reflections are as convincing as cliffs" -Charles Bernstein.

The Composition of Glass (Lost Roads, 34)

Literature & Fiction

Foss, Phillip

Poetry

Lost Roads Publishers

Poetry. Phillip Foss's CHROMATIC DEFACEMENT is a new fin de siecle theater of cruelty with the roles played by perfumes, echoes and elisions. Coquettish effluvia. Susan Howe meets Bataille and they have this child called Fetter of Nuance or, in fact, CHROMATIC DISPLACEMENT. I think I'm in love with it. - Rae Armantrout. There is the entrance of submission. The opening / is very low, or very shallow, as if its fabricator desired removal / of one's head in entering, not concerning stature / but sensation and dialectics. (The Theater of Perfumes). Following the steps of Phillip Foss, one of Lully's latter-day and more intrepid progeny surely, you will re-make desire. Re-make it and re-make it. Re-make it and make it last. At last. - John Taggart.

Chromatic Defacement

Chax Press

<p>Poetry. "You are in the quadrant of beasts." So opens the poetic terrain Phillip Foss excavates in The Ideation, a book rich in the rituals of the instant in which past, present, and future conspire "to render a cartography of the universe." And it's a particularly feral universe these poems map, one where "antlers index ascension into vocabularies of sensation." These poems enact a mutating world of constant becoming-other presided over by unforeseen seizures of land and mind. Foss is the author of nine collections of poetry, including The Composition of Glass, Courtesan of Seizure, and Chromatic Defacement.</p>

The Ideation

History & Criticism

Singing Horse Press

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.

Imperfect Poverty

Poetry. His seventh full-length volume of poetry, Phillip Foss's THE VALLEY OF CRANES excavates a wordscape--at once archaic and prophetic, imagined and lived--originating in the poet's homeground of New Mexico's Chaco Canyon. Following on his two previous books from Singing Horse Press--THE IDEATION (2004) and IMPERFECT POVERTY (2006)--Foss's new suite of poems takes us "where the chatter / of thought becomes chromatic / becomes visual dissonance." These poems are a synaesthetic feast for eye, ear, and mind. "A meditational tone steeped in quirk and particularity marks THE VALLEY OF CRANES. Anything could be something else in this book that abounds in unpredictable declaration. Sensuous and astringent both, Phillip Foss's poems offer pause, gleam, glint, edification--repeated yield of angular prospect and purchase"--Nathaniel Mackey.

The Valley of Cranes