"The Word is my shepherd. / I shall be wanted.” Chris Toll has the trust to know. There are days I think trust is 90% of a poet, and if anyone among us can prove this it’s Chris Toll. “Why is fusion in confusion? / Why isn’t dance in coincidence?” He puts the world to you like you’ve just started seeing. Hearing. Poems that wake us are the very lightning rods to enter storms with. I do believe Hell could be driven from the heart with Chris Toll’s amazing new book." - CA Conrad
"Chris Toll has looked within words and entities to discover almost everything is weeping. Emily Dickinson’s breaking code in the Pentagon, Toll’s heart is aching and full, and meanwhile these poems are tenderly repossessing the ineffable and the commonplace. It is a grand and lovely thing to read this book." - Heather Christle
"The Disinformation Phase is conspiracy theory in poetic practice. A middle-aged David Bowie as Nikola Tesla is still outdated compared to the retro-futurism of Chris Toll. This future ain’t the way you remembered it; yet, from a past where cold fusion is always thirty years away, Toll’s book opens a bowl of hope in your hands, and – a blast of zoominess, enough to power a city. His is poetry of propulsion: for/towards a sonic age, every sentence goes off like a rocket, objects act, sonnets are psionic, civilization collapses while shafts of light break through the earth’s crust. What’s more, “The Disinformation Phase,” as a phase, suggests the next phase: if suns go out, manufacture new suns (through chaos magic, as in “Paradox is my toolshed”), manufacture new solar systems. Cosmic!" - Magus Magnus
"... a Tollian world of contemplation but with a lightness about it, a playfulness. Amid the play come profound moments." - Lauren Larocca
"The Disinformation Phase by Chris Toll is a brand new book of poems that zings with quick, clever wordplay and imagery that is bracingly fresh.” - Cara Ober
"You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, let alone its author, but just this once, let’s do exactly that. The landscape on the cover of this book depicts the surface of another planet. That planet is inhabited by a clown, a tiger, a giant amphibious creature straddling something that looks like a cactus, an aardvark, a nun, or perhaps a nurse, a tiger, the invisible man, two different species of birds, Yoda, a flying saucer and yes, a snake, which is like a worm. The poetry of Chris Toll is just as imaginatively populated as this tableau. It is populated by unusual imagery, from which the cover is derived, no doubt. The poetry is also populated by Toll’s startling inquisitions of the language. For example, in a poem entitled Why is Try in Poetry the question is posed: “why is love backwards in evolve?” The title and that line are just two examples, among many, where Toll playfully examines the presence of one word within another." - Dylan Kinnett
"Baltimore based poet and futurist metaphysical collage artist Chris Toll has published a collection of poetry with Publishing Genius. The Disinformation Phase (2011, 60 pages) wafts toward the reader, intoxicating the oxygen in its path, oozing a slow morning fog along the way. I mean this in a profoundly positive sense, of course.
Anyone who has spent a number of hours in Baltimore knows that the city and sprawling communities just outside of the metropolitan region are enveloped by a sense of greyness, a melancholy which actually provides an interesting backdrop, if not motivation, for a very thriving underground arts scene. Like art itself, Baltimore— riddled with controversy and the pressure cooker illnesses of poverty, class war, and a general underbelly understanding—encompasses a harsher, hardboiled part of the country. From its wellspring issue glorious glorious “tough cookie” personalities, who choose to live deeply throughout the area, and are in fact some of the country’s most unknown, upcoming and intuitive talents. Enter authors like Michael Kimball, Justin Sirois, poet Jamie Gaughran-Perez. Enter Baltimore-based small indie publishing house Publishing Genius. Enter one of a kind poet Chris Toll. These are some of the voices of the future of literature, they are to be read closely.
Toll’s collection, like Baltimore itself, oscillates between distinctly gendered writerly climates. If one were to take apart Baltimore in, say, a spiritual sense, there would be a cooling factor in the low-fi eternal hum generated from the gray backdrop, a sadness in female aquatic waves. There would be heated, masculine, formed, thickly layered boiling Mid-Atlantic summer temperatures. As sprung from Baltimore herself and himself, Toll’s work is polarized and clearly engendered. In this poet’s androgynous shapeshifting, we find an academic and esoteric reasoning; we find higher thought. In Toll’s poems we have some incredibly female modes and some intensely masculine modes respectfully, when some authors do not even consider to consider gender, do not consider sexuality in thought, and here it provides a glorious reading throughout.
From “Perfect Love”:
O darling,
let the eternal divine feminine energy
awaken within you.
We find a shift in voice, an expansion of strength in “Why Is
Go in God?”:
Live would be love
if a scowl were different.
I repair a fable
and it wanders the galaxy.
The power towers are marching.
Not all of Toll’s work is so plainly stated. In fact, many of the poems sing vulnerability. In the grey Baltimore sadness, we are opened to a heavy hearted man, writing toward redemptive, emotive longing. We are reading questions asked, we are heavy hearted with our poet in his honesty, in his vulnerability. This is a guy we want to sit with at the end of a long bar counter and just kind of, well, sit. “The ache in my heart lets me know you exist.” He paints.
Toll beckons the reader ‘opened’ to a question of consequence, a question of responsibility. The poet weaves social signifiers throughout: “(unfortunately, not against vampires – and how our hero lost her lightsaber is another poem).” The author writes. In “What Have You Done for Global Warming Today?” we are given a fictitious translation, or a literal translation, as interpretation, as the work is signified in humor, with a “by John Keats (translated by Chris Toll).” Further fixing the work through extra dimension.
From “I Expand Before Nebulae”:
I am lost in the dark wood
and you becalm my mansion.
The work moves from historical reference to varying examinations of the self, and returns in both cases, toward a deeper sense of a wonderment and concern for the world. Toll writes from Dickinson’s perspective. The narrative is woven further. In “National Poetry Month” Toll writes: “[s]he says, ‘I’ve lost everything -nothing scares me now.” Later in “1776” we travel in time to Dickinson’s words through Toll in “Irregular Galaxy”: “I’ve lost Everything – I’ve lost Everything Twice.” (Note the capitalization of ET in the latter sentence.) Attention is drawn to subjects greater than, though ultimately the self, and how and why one is in this universe to face the questions Toll posits. A light flashing, signals, signs. Later from “Why Is Go in God?”:
A woman stands on a bridge,
tears spill from her eyes,
and she asks a constellation,
What am I being saved for?
In Toll’s disinformation, insight informs. Humility and bravery abound, the conscious is ever-shifting, and our understanding of our understanding equally moved. Toll’s concern is not entirely with why, but rather, how. One gleans the growing sense that Publisher and Poet Adam Robinson has advised Toll on the order of the poems directly. When we open the pages, we are immediately met with a sense of calm, rather, a sense of trust, which earns us the stamina to follow on through these beautifully crafted, painfully rendered works. Toll’s first poem closes with “[b]e light,” offering a sense of stability, strength through two words. We are cared for, not talked at. Toll has the gift of minimalism within him, the talent of spare economics. This poetry collection transcends the self because of its outward orientation; in Toll’s self-examination, perhaps in his brooding, we are given comfort in commiseration." - Nicolle Elizabeth
"I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and went down to the kitchen to fix a cup of chamomile tea. A strange throbbing hum, low and persistent, grew louder, but I couldn’t tell whether it was coming from inside my head or inside the house. Then I noticed a light emanating from my study. There on the desk, bathed in a pulsing green glow, was a book. I thought about Kryptonite and the light at the end of Daisy’s dock and then picked it up and read the title: The Disinformation Phase. It was a collection of poems by Chris Toll. I wasn’t sure how it arrived, but I sat down in my favorite chair and began to read; the book grew warmer in my hands and seemed to purr.
Reading The Disinformation Phase is like entering a world where the interstates all lead to mansions or to nowhere and where dinosaurs roam free as UFOs soar overhead. It is a parallel universe where things have turned around on themselves to show their true nature. Many of the words and phrases sound oh so familiar, but are odd and out of kilter like Bizarro Superman reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance or “The Lord’s Prayer.” It is a world where nonseqiturs make beautiful sense.
The collection is divided into three sections, a trinity containing fifty poems. These are poems about the spiritual nature of human suffering and longing suffused with love and yearning. It is a gentle love. This is a little book with a Big Heart filled with small poems with a large vision. Toll writes with a romantic’s machine gun that fires flowers, balloon animals, and soap bubbles filled with nitrous oxide. The poems interrogate you with questions the Cowardly Lion would ask after taking a massive dose of LSD. “Who pays the rent in coherent?” “Why is us in Jesus?” “How long can I stay at the inn in innocent?”
They are populated with a mishmash of religious and cultural references and icons that have never been assembled together under one rooftop. They whirl in a galactic swirl of word play and alliteration and stretch across time and space with references to everything from pterodactyls and Cortez to vampires, Jedis, and antimatter logarithms. Cameos feature such luminaries as T.S. Eliot, Edward Hopper, Mary and Jesus, Bob Dylan, and Jackson Brown.
A parade of saints you will not find in Butler’s Lives of Saints, but who should be there, march through the poetic lines in a religious pilgrimage to the one true God, a woman, “who is so busy praying/She doesn’t have time to answer my prayers.” Here you will find the Saint of Long Dances, Second Glances, and Wrong Prepositions in the procession.
Then there are a group of poems purporting to be recently discovered works by John Keats, Eddy Poe, Sylvia Path, and Emily Dickinson. In short prose introductions, Toll explains the odd circumstances by which these literary treasures came to light and into his possession. Each of the newly unearthed works is written in a language not native to the original poet, and Toll offers his translation. We are thankful for his efforts in bringing us these new insights into the work of these writers and adding greater understanding of their body of work. It is a commendable feat.
Chris Toll is the Yoda Jedi master of metaphor, the Kay Ryan of the lonely and broken hearted and the High Priest of the Disenfranchised. At times, you may feel as if you are a stranger in a strange land, but as he says in “Carbon-Based Lifeform Blues,” “the job of the poet is not to explain the Mystery./The job of the poet is to make the Mystery greater.” And Chris Toll has done that.
By the time I finished reading, the rosy finger of dawn was stretching over the horizon and I found myself dozing off into blissful slumber. When I awoke, the book was gone, so I am not sure whether it was all a dream or not, but today I will make a pilgrimmage down the interstate in search of a copy of The Disinformation Phase by Chris Toll to still the turmoil in my heart and bring me inner peace with the suffering of the world." - Alan C. Reese
"In “Carbon-Based Lifeform Blues,” Chris Toll writes, “The job of poets is not to explain the Mystery. / The job of poets is to make the Mystery greater”—which is precisely what Toll accomplishes in his new collection of poems. The Disinformation Phase brings together 50 poems—including some “translations”—that, though economic in language, are wide in scope, expansive in imagination, and linguistically playful. Divided into three sections whose titles exemplify the playfulness (“The Ritual in Spiritual,” “The We in Weep,” and “The Ion in Redemption”), the book consists of short, concise poems where inanimate objects are capable of action and emotion, as seen in the opening poem, “Insulator Drive Blues”:
A glacier
hotwires my supermarket
and leaves the city
in a hurry.
Good and evil
is an illusion.
My cathedral
blows its brains out
in the graveyard
behind a prison.
The struggle
is between light and dark.
My slaughterhouse
mixes a martini for the moon.
Be light.
In other poems, a meatpacking plant “trademarks its bad brainwaves,” a bookstore “wraps six kilos / in plastic,” an insane asylum “plays solitaire / all night long,” and “fluorescent lights march to their doom.” While many of the images are dark, there is a generosity and love here—a goal to “Be light,” as Toll instructs in the opening poem. It’s easy to imagine the author as a Whitman of sorts; he sees humanity everywhere and takes it all in: “Oh Haunted City, / I drink the light in every face.” In “Irregular Galaxy,” Toll writes, “A Big Voice pours through me”—and that voice contains multitudes.
Throughout the collection, Toll examines words, breaking them into pieces:
I’m the sin in singer.
Why is tiny in destiny?
I’m the cure in obscure.
Why is a trip in triple-crossed
and where am I going?
I’m the yes in yesterday.
Why isn’t destiny in clandestine?
(“Working for the Redshift (Peachpicker Blues)” )
In addition to these questions, a number of the poems play on familiar phrases and religious sayings. “Bless me, Monster, / for I am a hymn,” Toll writes in “Electricity Is My Friend,” and in “23 Palms,” “The Word is my shepherd. / I shall be wanted” (a few variations on this psalm show up throughout book). The reader will also encounter “translations” of poems by a time-traveling Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, John Keats, and Sylvia Plath.
In “The Third Station of the Double-Crossed,” the speaker says, “My mission is so secret / I don’t know it myself”—if only everyone were on such missions. This is a brief collection, but one worth returning to regularly in order to be reminded that the world is a wondrous place. In The Disinformation Phase, Toll turns his attention to the mystery and amps it up." - Gina Myers
"In his new full-length book of poetry, The Disinformation Phase, Chris Toll offers up a vision of poetic enlightment. Within a deceptively minimal set of syntactic maneuvers, Toll presents a rich and varied world of boundless danger and boundless wonder.
Many poems parody teaser-trailers, setting the scene for some cataclysmic event, ending just before we get there. The book is heavy on foreplay, which is all for the better. Toll earns every climax:
"and my God is you."
"There is an ache where my heart used to be."
"Be light."
Etc., etc.
Counter to the bulk of the last few decades of American poetry—noncommittal, objectivist, compulsively brainy—The Disinformation Phase is aesthetically certain (almost a manifesto, in fact), imaginative, and emotionally fearless. Even when employing classic post-modern devices, Toll remains an enchanted practitioner. For example, puns, too often the frustrated purpose of idle poetic hands, here act in the service of an ongoing, fruitful investigation of a secret spiritual language.
In some ways Toll has been writing the same poem for years. But don't confuse a focused artistic vision with the lack thereof. That's how most people missed the brilliance of the Ramones the first time around. The poems resemble each other because each is an incomplete incarnation of the same vast and intangible generative force. It's like the Tao Te Ching, except it's all lies. Of course, I don't quite mean that. In his poems Toll plays the part of the snake oil salesman, but in this case the snake oil works, and hidden in the performance of the con are many actual truths that range from the personal to the cosmic." - R. M. O'Brien
"When Publishing Genius mastermind Adam Robinson knocked, scratched and rubbed feverishly against my door at 3am two nights ågo, I thought the exterminator had failed in his job of eradicating the herd of raccoons that had invaded our neighborhood after "Lay Your Trash Out Resplendently In The Grass Week".
I hurriedly ran downstairs with my pellet gun after Everly refused to go first.
With beer foam still caught on his late 1800's baseball player neo-handlebar moutstache, writers of more purplish prose might have described Adam's state as "mad as a hatter", or "rabidly inflamed" or "downright batshit", but I will go for a more subdued description of him as beside himself. "Please calm down, Adam. Tell me what's going on. And why do you have that microphone with a ripped cord in your hand?"
"Justin, Steph and I were out karoaking and you'll never believe what we found out behind the building! This being from another planet that drinks beer and looks like Lenin! After we warmed him up some at my apartment and showed him cashmere sweater porn that he requested, he actually began to speak. And his language came out in almost poetic form - a weird cross between Emily Dickinson and some kind of cosmic spiritual sci-fi."
It was at this point that my spider senses began to tingle. Either Max my faithful collie was rubbing against my bare leg or I had a strong suspicion of "what" or more precisely "Whom" Adam had stumbled upon.
An hour later, after Adam and Justin had for no particular reason put a black bag over my head and made me empty out my bank account at two ATMs (my bank's ATMs only dispense $10 at a time), we arrived at the condominium that sits on the Inner Harbor where Adam resides with the city's ingenue mayor, Stephanie Rawlings Blake.
Sure enough, once we passed through the guards and the heavy penthouse door swung open, there facing us, sipping a Yuengling and looking like the cat who ate the canary or the Burt Reynolds who gave the Dom DeLuise a wedgy, was none other than my old friend and literary mentor Chris Toll.
When I first moved to Baltimore in the early '80s, the last glow was fading from the Orioles and there was a fantastic poetry magazine here run by Chris called Open 24 Hours. Over the next few decades many writers have succumbed to burnout or drugs or booze or death itself, but Senor Toll continues to evolve and shed skins. He even started a new reading series a few years ago with the Italian Futurist, Barbara DeCesare. Now here he was, youthful again, with a new book coming out on a powerful Baltimore press. The book in question is The Disinformation Phase and it sports an original Toll collage on its cover.
Chris Toll's precision with an Exacto knife, the main tool of his collage making, is so legendary at this point that when Dick Cheney was brought to Johns Hopkins for a tumor on his moral conscience, they had to bring in Chris to locate and excise the miniscule portion of Cheney's brain. Chris, despite whatever he felt about the former Vice President, felt obligated to carry out the task - such is the weight of his powers.
As always, Chris is irresistibly quotable: "Chaos is my preacher/A Big Voice pours through me" (Irregular Galaxy); "I call my sickness the Guest./The Guest will speak now." (No Blues Blues #43); "Satellite dishes drink stars,/a church falls asleep in front of the TV,/and you're a prayer just the way you are." (Love Your Enemies). As I pull these, more lines jump out waving their arms in stay pressed unitards of quirky timelessness.
As Magus Magnus, the frighteningly brainy poet with the eery saucer eyes says on the back cover of the fancy "Advance Review Copy" I am lucky enough to hold (but which may soon belong to Henry Rollins since his $50 bid on it on ebay is so far the highest):
"His is poetry of propulsion : for/towards a sonic age, every sentence goes off like a rocket, objects act, sonnets are psionic, civilization collapses while shafts of light break through the earth's crust. What's more, The Disinformation Phase, as a phase, suggests the next phase: if suns go out, manufacture new suns (through chaos magic, as in 'paradox is my toolshed'), manufacture new solar systems. Cosmic!"
The official release date for this book is June 28th and summer seems like an appropiate season for it. You can feel the ache of brutal winters past in these prayers to the skies, but there is a feeling of fresh urgency and rebirth to them; each one explodes with possible stories, possible new lives. Chris writes that "the job of the poets is not to explain the Mystery./The job of the poets is to make the mystery greater." and indeed with his dynamic new book he has given us many more cloaks to wrap ourselves in and feel like Cyclops strutting on the crumbling catwalk arching over the Milky Way." - Rupert Wondolowski
E x c e r p t
Song of Magnetic Service
The wind whispers
to a weeping willow,
"You won’t be lonely forever.”
We buy our wedding rings
in a pawnshop.
The past will be redeemed
by the love to come.
You have bluffs in your soul
where I can stand
and see a hundred miles of you.
I have a hundred years of sorrow in my eyes.
O Holy Heart,
you will be my joy
on the day the world ends.
The Pilgrim Dreaming
I’m in a suburb of Cleveland.
I’m talking to a monitor in a mailbox.
The husband and wife are wearing pig masks.
They say they won’t deactivate the force field.
Missiles are screaming over my head
and destroying houses a block away.
No Blues Blues #43
I call my sickness the Guest.
The Guest will speak now.
On the steps of the Winter Palace,
the guards turned
and fired their carbines
at the Reptilian Overlords.
I used to be the King of Hell.
The Overmind of a praying mantis
loves your Higher Self.
A robin retires from a branch
and resumes his Intransigent Grace.
Jessica the Christ will have miracles
crackling through Her fingertips.
The ache in my heart lets me know you exist.
Official Website
It Has to Live in The Air : A Conversation with Chris Toll
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