All the Ordinariness

In ALL THE ORDINARINESS, Tony Mancus busts up and builds back language to explore the tragic injustice of imagination: the imagined self you carry in your head and the one that spills out in front of others, the imagined, possible world and the one we wake up in every day. Mancus grounds us in the gore of a fractured civilization with feverish lists--Here this bag of stone, here a cricket saw, a claw from a crayfish --the way we might list five things we see, four we hear, three we feel, to fend off an anxiety attack. He upends notions we abide through habit, kettle calling the pot back, the yeahs in every song, and copes with the chaos that creates by summoning new words--mothwalks, seedpit, deadlipped, lackabody. I admire Mancus's honest voice, the acknowledgement of a certain depressed resignation, more imagetext/more-tisements, and I am awestruck by the way he always writes us back into finding delight in the world: You can always go now. You can always go on. Like a light. Really like it. I love the way this book trusts language, and how it makes me trust in it, too.--Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors

Poetry.