WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY A new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips's Then the War I’m a song, changing. I’m a light rain falling through a vast darkness toward a different darkness. Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an “ongoing quest”; Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started. Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillips’s work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures. Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.
After / the afterlife, there's an afterlife." In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we're willing to commit fully to a life in which "I love you / means what, exactly?" In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage it takes to look at the self squarely—not with judgment but with understanding—and extend that self more honestly toward others. It's a risk, there's a lot to lose, but if it's true that "we'll drown anyway—why not / in color?
The award-winning poet Carl Phillips's invaluable essays on poetry, the tenth volume in the celebrated Art of series of books on the craft of writing In seven insightful essays, Carl Phillips meditates on the craft of poetry, its capacity for making a space for possibility and inquiry. What does it mean to give shapelessness a form? How can a poem explore both the natural world and the inner world? Phillips demonstrates the restless qualities of the imagination by reading and examining poems by Ashbery, Bogan, Frost, Niedecker, Shakespeare, and others, and by considering other art forms, such as photography and the blues. The Art of Daring is a lyrical, persuasive argument for the many ways that writing and living are acts of risk. "I think it's largely the conundrum of being human that makes us keep making," Phillips writes. "I think it has something to do with revision—how, not only is the world in constant revision, but each of us is, as well.
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets. Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self’s multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most critically admired poets “What has restlessness been for?” In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named—love at once restless, reckless, and yet desired for its potential to bring stability. In the process, he pitches estrangement against communion, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past’s capacity both to teach and to mislead us—also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love’s fallout. How “to say no to despair”? How to take perhaps that greatest risk, the risk of believing in what offers no guarantee? These poems that, in their wedding of the philosophical, meditative, and lyric modes, mark a new stage in Phillips’s remarkable work, stand as further proof that “if Carl Phillips had not come onto the scene, we would have needed to invent him. His idiosyncratic style, his innovative method, and his unique voice are essential steps in the evolution of the craft” (Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review).
The light, for as far as I can see, is that of any number of late afternoons I remember still: how the light seemed a bell; how it seemed I'd been living insider it, waiting - I'd heard all about that one clear note it gives. --from "Late Apollo III" In The Rest of Love, his seventh book, Carl Phillips examines the conflict between belief and disbelief, and our will to believe: Aren't we always trying, Phillips asks, to contain or to stave off facing up to, even briefly, the hard truths we're nevertheless attracted to? Phillips's signature terse line and syntax enact this constant tension between abandon and control; following his impeccable interior logic, "passionately austere" (Rita Dove, The Washington Post Book World), Phillips plumbs the myths we make and return to in the name of desire--physical, emotional, and spiritual. The Rest of Love is a 2004 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America's most distinctive—and one of poetry's most essential—contemporary voices. Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. Over the course of nine critically acclaimed collections, he has generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world. These new poems are of a piece with Phillips's previous work in their characteristic clarity and originality of thought, in their unsparing approach to morality and psychology, and in both the strength and startling flexibility of their line. Speak Low is the record of a powerful vision that, in its illumination of the human condition, has established itself as a necessary step toward our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first century. Speak Low is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
A stunning new collection of poems from the author of Speak Low Comparing any human life to "a restless choir" of impulses variously in conflict and at peace with one another, Carl Phillips, in his eleventh book, examines the double shadow that a life casts forth: "now risk, and now / faintheartedness." In poems that both embody and inhabit this double shadow, risk and faintheartedness prove to have the power equally to rescue us from ourselves and to destroy us. Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet not without hope, Double Shadow argues for life as a wilderness through which there's only the questing forward—with no regrets and no looking back. Double Shadow is a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011
An arresting study of memory, perception, and the human condition, from the Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips. Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that’s based on human memory. If the poet’s last few books have concerned themselves with power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the usefulness of embracing it and of releasing ourselves from the need to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it happen? If we believe it didn’t, does that make our belief true? In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks though the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition—“Tears / were tears,” mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn’t, the way people live until they don’t. And there was also joy. And beauty. “Yet the world’s still / so beautiful . . . Sometimes // it is . . .” And it was enough. And it still can be.
In Riding Westward, Carl Phillips wields his celebrated gifts for syntax and imagery that are unmistakably his own--speculative, athletic, immediate--as he confronts moral crisis. The singer turning this and that way, as if watching the song itself --the words to the song--leave him, as he lets each go, the wind carrying most of it, some of the words, falling, settling into instead that larger darkness, where the smaller darknesses that our lives were lie softly down." --from "Riding Westward" What happens when the world as we've known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able--or less willing--to distinguish reality from what is desired? What is the difference, Phillips asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.
A masterful new collection by one of our most important contemporary lyric poets Wind as a face gone red with blowing, oceans whose end is broken stitchery-- swim of sea-dragon, dolphin, shimmer-and-coil, invitation. . . . You Know the kind of map I mean. Countries as distant as they are believable . . . --from "Halo" Carl Phillips lyric explorations of longing and devotion, castigation and mercy, are unrivaled in contemporary poetry. Here, in his sixth book, Phillips visits those spaces, both physical and psychological, where risk and safety coincide, and considers what it might mean to live at the nexus of the two. Sifting among the upturned evidence of crisis, from Roman Empire to westward expansion, from the turn of a lover's face to the harbor of the book's title--a place of calm fashioned of the very rock that can mean disaster--these poems negotiate and map out the impulse toward rescue and away from it. Phillips's pooling, cascading lines are the unsuppressed routes across his unique poetic landscape, daring and seductive in their readiness to drift and reverse as the terrain demands.
Graceful and resonant new work by a lyric poet at the height of his skill. "Like something broken of wing, lying there. Other than breathing's rise, catch, release, a silence, as of some especially wounded animal that, nevertheless, still is conscious, you can see straight through the open eye to where instinct falters because for once it has come divided" --from "Chamber Music" In the art of falconry, during training the tether between the gloved fist and the raptor's anklets is gradually lengthened and eventually unnecessary. In these new lyric poems, Carl Phillips considers the substance of connection -- between lover and beloved, mind and body, talon and perch -- and its the cable of mutual trust between soaring figure and shadowed ground. Contemporary literature can perhaps claim no poetry more clearly allegorical than that of Carl Phillips, whose four collections have turned frequently to nature, myth, and history for illustration; still, readers know the primary attributes of his work to be its physicality, grace, and disarming honesty about desire and faith. In The Tether, his fifth book, Phillips's characteristically cascading poetic line is leaner and more dramatic than ever.
Winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize A fresh and rebellious poetic voice, Airea D. Matthews debuts in the acclaimed series that showcases the work of exciting and innovative young American poets. Matthews's superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication. In his foreword, series judge Carl Phillips calls this book "rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant." This is poetry that breaks new literary ground, inspiring readers to think differently about what poems can and should do in a new media society where imaginations are laid bare and there is no thought too provocative to send out into the world.
An invaluable companion for any writer seeking to make the writing life a more complex and cooperative venture "Illuminating, deeply endearing essays."--Ron Charles, Washington Post "A lovely, loving letter to aspiring writers."--Diego Báez, Booklist In these intimate and eloquent meditations, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has learned about the writing life, an "apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered." Drawing on forty years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers, he weaves his experiences as a poet with the necessary survival skills, including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community. In the tradition of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, this is an invaluable companion for writers at every stage of their journey. Phillips's book serves as a partner in speculation and an invitation to embrace mystery.
Winner of the 2015 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize Noah Warren's brilliant collection of poetry, The Destroyer in the Glass, is the 110th recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Warren explores universal themes of isolation and the desire for human connection in a series of tightly crystallized poems that question the damage we have done--to ourselves and to others--in the pursuit of knowledge and a stable idea of who we are. Balancing a tendency toward form, rhyme, and allusion with a freer, expressive style, this exceptional young poet charts the development of the self through, by, and in language. Since 1919, the Yale Series of Younger Poets has launched the careers of poets as esteemed and varied as Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Robert Hass. Judge Carl Phillips praises The Destroyer in the Glass for "its wedding of intellect, heart, sly humor, and formal dexterity, all in the service of negotiating those moments when an impulse toward communion with others competes with an instinct for a more isolated self.
Winner of the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize Originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award presented in the United States. Ansel Elkins's poetry collection, Blue Yodel, is the 109th volume to be so honored. Esteemed poet and competition judge Carl Phillips praises Elkins for her "arresting use of persona," calling her poems "razor-edged in their intelligence, Southern Gothic in their sensibility." In her imaginative and haunting debut collection, Elkins introduces readers to a multitude of characters whose "otherness" has condemned them to live on the margins of society. She weaves blues, ballads, folklore, and storytelling into an intricate tapestry that depicts the violence, poverty, and loneliness of the Deep South, as well as the compassion, generosity, and hope that brings light to people in their darkest times. The blue yodel heard throughout this diverse compilation is a raw, primal, deeply felt expression of the human experience, calling on us to reach out to the isolated and disenfranchised and to find the humanity in every person.
A masterfully curated collection, drawn from a century of works in the acclaimed Yale Series of Younger Poets The Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Its winners include some of the most influential voices in American poetry, including Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Margaret Walker, Carolyn Forché, and Robert Hass. In celebration of the prize's centennial, this collection presents three selections from each Younger Poets volume. It serves as both a testament to the enduring power and significance of poetic expression and an exploration of the ways poetry has evolved over the past century. In addition to judiciously assembling this wide-ranging anthology, Carl Phillips provides an introduction to the history and impact of the Yale Younger Poets prize and its winners in the wider context of American poetry, including the evolving roles of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Ride along with Carl Weber and C. N. Phillips for this fresh, enthralling spin‑off to the Family Business series as the heir to a crime family finds himself targeted by an enemy. He’ll need more than his family by blood to save him… Nevada Duncan is the heir to the Duncan and Zuniga crime family fortunes, but before he can take the mantle of power, he has to be educated about the family business. So, after the death of his girlfriend, he enrolls in his father’s alma mater, Chi’s Finishing School. Chi’s is the world’s most elite school for the children of underworld figures. On Nevada’s first day of school, he hooks up with a group of misfits from around the world who quickly become his new best friends. However, Nevada is unaware of the deadly adventure that awaits him with a sinister new enemy who is lurking in the shadows. Accustomed to relying on his family and his own superior intelligence, Nevada will soon learn the importance of friendship when the threats are aimed directly at him and he’s the only Duncan around. Welcome to the world of Chi’s Finishing School. Ride along with Carl Weber and C. N. Phillips for this fresh, enthralling spin-off to the Family Business series.
Keep up with the Duncan family down South as we travel to New Orleans in The Family Business 7. Operated by the same family for more than a century, Midnight Blues may be fun for the locals and the tourists, but as of late, the club hasn’t been fun for its owner, Big Shirley Duncan, or her son Marquis, descendants of the original proprietors. The pair finds themselves in the middle of a turf war between local politicians, developers, and a ruthless underworld boss, Jean LeBlanc, who is looking to make a name for himself. Afraid for the first time in her life that her family may lose control of The Blues, Big Shirley sends Marquis out of town for his own safety. Marquis takes a detour to New York to see the family of her brother-in-law, LC Duncan. His New York family enlists the help of bounty hunter Curtis Duncan and his highly trained sister, Lauryn Duncan, to help add some muscle and security to their family’s struggling business.
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