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.