A Walking Cliche Coins a Phrase is an utterly unique book of poems. Despite the subtitle, this is a book of poems, filled with true wit (strange things go on in this man s head ), strong music, a stone blind love (the only kind of love that matters) of language, and a wild, wild heart.
Thomas Lux, author of God Particles
The road to psychic wholeness, Chad Prevost asks, is to bury oneself in sweetness like a bee making Heaven in a fallen pear? In these marvelously inventive prose poems, Prevost does just that, chronicling the journey of a man facing the false dichotomy of a world that pits spirit against flesh, what is risen against what has fallen. Like Mircea Eliade s The Sacred and the Profane, Prevost locates a new site for the sacred that refuses either pole of a suffocating binary, choosing a reciprocity of the spiritual and mundane. These poems are guided by the healing power of attention to family, culture, and especially the quirks and curves that guide us crookedly home. We experience a questioning speaker raised by a pastor father; a young man who worships Led Zeppelin s Robert Plant; an adult who realizes he is just visiting this planet, proclaiming Wherever you go there you are; and a husband who compares a birthmark on the buttock of the beloved to the shape of Venezuela or Mongolia, concluding that there is the history the world knows and the one forever hidden from view. It is this secret/sacred sight that treats everything with tenderness and care, particularly the profundity of love. Be wary of the thing you love, Prevost says. Tread lightly, with the deference of one approaching a god. Chad Prevost has written a powerful and deeply humane book of prose poems that merges the imaginative possibilities of the poem with the day-to-day paragraphs of our lives.
George Kalamaras, author of Gold, Carp, Jack, Fruit, Mirrors