Poetry
ISBN 978-1-957746-11-1
p.93
 
Same After Life wades into and through the dreamlike spaces of an imagined post-life trajectory using a crown of sonnets, apostrophe, and spatial play to tether our shared and semi-habitable reality of loss and survival to form. The collection, sectioned into four movements, scrambles and re-assembles concepts of sameness, afterward, and life to reinvent presence as a simultaneous space of acknowledged absence, asking readers to question the dichotomic-understanding of being and non-being. A book that is haunting, meditative, expansive, careful, and charged— this elegiac beast suspends us in a space of possibilities for transmutable iterations of being. 
 
PRAISE FOR SAME AFTER LIFE:
 
“In Mancus’s poetry, language replicates, mutates, cascades, falls apart, like people, trees, skies, and fire do, the words/world both funny and uncanny—your head is ‘a gravestone’ and ‘a liquor cabinet.’ These are poems about journeys and rituals (‘I went to the restroom and wept,’ ‘I went to the city to repeat my mistakes’), our panics and miniscule tragedies. ‘The truth is something / cute or awful’; we have poems to help us face it.” Elisa Gabbert, author of Normal Distance 
 
"Tony Mancus writes, '. . . there are feelings other than grief and loss and regret to capture,' and he distills the everyday and interior nuances of what’s in-between these big-abstract-noun-emotions, creating a freewheeling and exacting phenomenology of mind and spirit. This book’s verbal textures are lyrical and exuberant, a rolling tumult, but always a little haunted, hollowed with loss, tinged with an unnerving strangeness. These are wise, capacious, and tender poems because of their ironies and ceaseless experiments, not despite them. Mancus’s linguistic and intellectual resources feel boundless here." Tim Earley author of Linthead Stomp
 
TONY MANCUS is the author of several chapbooks and All the Ordinariness (The Magnificent Field). He works as an instructional designer, serves as chapbook editor for Barrelhouse, and lives in Colorado with his wife, son, and two yappy cats.