A Walking Cliche Coins a Phrase

"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