What are the paradoxes of the writing life, especially for a writer who represents the work of other writers? Philip Brady, poet at Youngstown State University and publisher at Etruscan Press, begins Phantom Signs pondering this question from his dual perspective as a professional writer and small-press publisher. This book emerges from the tension between these modes of being in the world: the writer’s dark; the editor’s light.
 
With humor, grace, and intelligence, this collection of personal essays comprises a reflective memoir, offering insights into the way that art affirms and resists identity. Rather than recounting events chronologically, Brady lets the “muse” meander through discourses on childhood poems, heart surgery, basketball, Homer, and po-biz, featuring a cast of characters that range from the Sea Nymph to The Three Stooges. Throughout, Brady plays on the creative tension between poetry’s dual means of apprehension: sound and text. Fixed yet ephemeral, poems make “phantom signs.” From this viewpoint, poetry is not merely a canon or even a literary genre, but a way to reshape mind and world—and what a world: bars, hospitals, swimming pools, bandstands, publishing offices, hoops courts, prisons, mythic love trysts, and descents into the underworld, as well as classrooms from four decades on three continents.
 
Brady’s experiences will ring true not only for those who would peer behind the curtain into the writers’ life but also for those who wrestle with the implications of their own aging. Readers who fear that poetry is bound by anthologies, cliques, and textbooks, will be heartened. Shimmering with lyrical prose, clever wordplay, and a lifetime’s immersion in literature, Brady’s reflections on the power of the muse are essential reading.
 

 

"Phantom Signs skitters playfully between memoir and criticism, impelled forward by the inspired imaginary chirography of luminary figures—real and fictitious, heroic and infamous—beginning with Chinua Achebe, Achilles, and Aeneas, and ending with Zarathustra, Robert Allen Zimmerman, and Louis Zukovsky. Brady recounts love affairs, travel, aging, a late marriage, recollections from early childhood, the innerworkings of a small poetry press, the insights gleaned from a life wed to great literature.  Along the way there are notable observations, such as: “Poems are so enigmatic. Each emerges from some private darkness which publication does not entirely dispel. No one wants to be taken in by a false poem. An accidental verse.” Here, as everywhere else in Phantom Signs, Brady emphasizes the mysterious, the atomized substance of words charged with the ambition of enduring. In an essay that served as a commencement speech for the Wilkes University MFA Class of 2016, Brady writes: “When I say that writing begins with failure, I mean only that it begins there—what happens next is what counts. Most people give up. I think that those who make writing a life’s vocation aren’t necessarily the most talented; they are merely the most willing to experience profound and continuous defeat.” For those of us who love poetry, it is lucky that Philip Brady is one of those who haven’t given up."—Dante Di Stephano,  in Best American Poetry Blog

"A blurb on the back cover of professor-publisher-poet Philip Brady’s new book, Phantom Signs, describes it as a “high-spirited flash memoir.” This phrase could lead innocent readers to anticipate juicy tales of the author’s life as an American variety of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, a farouche academic who will take us on a frisky ride through the postmodern cultural landscape where we’ll encounter eccentric editors and nasty provosts (Brady’s particular bogeymen), attend poetry readings, ponder manuscripts and blurbs, get tutored in small press publication, pedagogical conundrums, and literary politics, all of this reamed with apercus about the miseries of social media and technology, remembrances of youthful erotic escapades, and punctuated by mildly astringent appraisals of poets past and present— Homer, Yeats, and H. L. Hix are the book’s tutelary spirits—as well as comical portraits of fellow litterateurs and beloved family members, the whole shebang battened together by droll wit and admirable forbearance. Brady’s dazzling new memoir (he wrote an earlier, more conventional one, To Prove My Blood, 2004), is all of these things, but it is the dream-like manner that he employs for the majority of the volume’s essays that transforms the volume into something rich and strange."—J. Michael Lennon, in Hippocampus

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