Books by Carl Phillips and Complete Book Reviews

Carl Phillips, Author . Farrar, Straus & Giroux $21 (128p) ISBN 978-0-374-25140-6
Lingering at the junctures of desire and attainment, Phillips's sixth collection demonstrates how the largest questions of ethics and responsibility play out, or perhaps disappear, in the smallest moments of intimate relationships, and find...
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Carl Phillips, Author . Farrar, Straus & Giroux $20 (80p) ISBN 978-0-374-24953-3
Furthering an idiom worked up over six previous books and showing no signs of exhaustion, Phillips delivers another brittle, electric set of poems on love, sex, masculinity and their classical contours. In 33 lyrics divided over three sections,...
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Carl Phillips, Author . Farrar, Straus & Giroux $20 (53p) ISBN 978-0-374-25003-4
The prolific, always articulate Phillips attained late-'90s acclaim for a series of books (among them Pastoral and From the Devotions ) whose intricate clauses and mythic topics followed the passions and trials of physical embodiment and erotic
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Carl Phillips, Author . Farrar, Straus & Giroux $15 (207p) ISBN 978-0-374-53078-5
Phillips is a scholar and translator of classical Greek and a writer of syntactically complex, desire-drenched love poems that subtly, and beautifully, reinvent classical tropes and forms. Phillips has published eight books of his own poetry: this...
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Carl Phillips, Author . Farrar, Straus & Giroux $22 (80p) ISBN 978-0-374-26716-2
This 10th book from the prolific Phillips (Quiver of Arrows ) is a quiet yet wounded reflection on Phillips’ signature subjects: relationships, distances, identity, and damage. Phillips’ remarkable ability to be clear yet illusive, as...
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Carl Phillips, Author Northeastern University Press $15.95 (69p) ISBN 978-1-55553-135-5
The publication of this volume introduces an unusually accomplished and innovative poet. The collection includes painterly poems, love poems, poems spun off of Greek mythology and Christian iconography, but at all times the work remains contemporary
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Carl Phillips, Author Graywolf Press $12.95 (81p) ISBN 978-1-55597-263-9
In its elegant three-part structure, Phillips's third collection continues his rigorous interrogations of desire and the complications of physical, moral and spiritual connection. Phillips begins with poems of earthly allegiance (engaging animals,...
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Carl Phillips, Author Graywolf Press $14 (96p) ISBN 978-1-55597-298-1
""When I think of desire,/ it is in the same way that I do// God: as parable, any steep/ and blue water, things that are always/ there, they only wait// to be sounded."" The lyric sounding of human feeling against desire, the natural world and...
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Carl Phillips, Author Farrar Straus Giroux $22 (80p) ISBN 978-0-374-26793-3
With his signature clausal intricacies and forbiddingly terse tercets intact, Phillips makes the jump after four books with Graywolf to FSG. Yet where books like Cort ge (1995) and From the Devotions (1998) were fraught attempts finding a language...
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Carl Phillips, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23 (64p) ISBN 978-0-374-14157-8
This 11th collection continues Phillips's assays into the connections between sex, attachment, and love, and the ways that, despite ecstatic moments, adult life means reconciling oneself to one's collective inadequacy. Phillips's peculiar fusion of...
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Carl Phillips. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23 (80p) ISBN 978-0-374-26121-4
In Phillips’ 12th collection, as in previous collections, form pushes the writing’s nimble logic, with ruminations on desire and risk deploying Phillips’ trademark, kinesthetic syntax. But these poems reach an unprecedented vulnerability through...
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Carl Phillips. Graywolf (FSG, dist.), $12 trade paper (136p) ISBN 978-1-55597-681-1
Literature meets life in poet Phillips’s accessible contribution to Graywolf’s The Art of series. Phillips (Silverchest) offers seven essays on the craft and meaning of poetry to determine his approach to the theme of “restlessness.” The poetic...
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Carl Phillips. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23 (80p) ISBN 978-0-374-29026-9
Phillips (Reconnaissance) hazards a visit to an emotional territory reminiscent of Dickinson’s “wild nights” in his 14th collection, in which he faces the unavoidable question: “Don’t you want to find happiness?” These 35 poems are as haunting and...
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Carl Phillips. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23 (64p) ISBN 978-0-374-22905-4
The rich, ruminative 14th book from Phillips (Silverchest) begins midconversation: “—By fire, then, but within view of a rough sea?” it asks as though imagining how someone would like to die. It ends with an affirmation of spring in “Defiance”: “For
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Carl Phillips. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35 (224p) ISBN 978-0-374-60376-2
Combining new and old poems from the last 13 years with sections of his lyric prose memoir, "Among the Trees," this selected offers admirers of Phillips's work a chance to revisit his masterful poems, and new readers an opportunity to see the...
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Carl Phillips. Yale Univ, $20 (112p) ISBN 978-0-300-25787-8
Poet Phillips (Then the War) offers a beautiful collection of essays on the writing life. Noting that “this book doesn’t claim to unveil any mysteries about writing,” Phillips instead offers thoughtful meditations on “how to live, as a writer.” “Sile
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Carl Phillips. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (80p) ISBN 978-0-374-61241-2
Phillips (Then the War) brings an increased awareness to endings in this elegant collection. “It’s hard/ to believe in them,/ the beautiful colors/ of extinction,” he writes in “Regime.” Phillips has long been an exquisite navigator of the long...
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