Then the War: and Selected Poems, 2007-2020 Hardcover – February 1, 2022 by Carl Phillips

Description

Author: Phillips Carl

Package Dimensions: 0x229x788

Number Of Pages: 224

Release Date: 01-02-2022

Details: Product Description
A new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips’s Then the WarI’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 attending 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 one goes, 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 resists easy pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as a profound force for revolution, 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.
Review
“A master class in [Phillips’s] deceptively gentle voice and striking depictions of raw humanity . . . Every selection provides a portal to this accomplished author’s work. An important milestone in the still flourishing career of a most brilliant poet.” ―Booklist”This selected offers admirers of Phillips’s work a chance to revisit his masterful poems, and new readers an opportunity to see the evolution of a vital presence in American poetry . . . These lyrically rich, insightful poems are full of palpable aching―’like the rhyme between lost/ and most’―and a human urge to understand. This remarkable compendium is a testament to the spirit of Phillips’s work.” ―Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
About the Author
Carl Phillips is the author of several books of poetry, including
Silverchest, a finalist for the International Griffin Prize, and
Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the author of
The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.