Carl Phillips is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Carcanet, 2022), which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). After more than thirty years of teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, he lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Description
Reviews
Then the War, is a forest-like network of linguistic relationships... ideas are turned over at different angles and that way gather complexity and momentum. Phillips operates in an altogether superior league.
Carol Rumens, The Poetry Review
...a poet whose art is among the best representations we have of the modern mind in all its wonder and melancholy uncertainty.
Jesse Nathan, McSweeneys
The 208 pages form a wonderfully compendious introduction to this major US poet. For those who have admired his work in the three decades since his debut, they are glowing confirmation that, as he enters his 60s, Phillips is writing better than ever ... a single project of the utmost immediacy.
Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
The writing dazzles with transcendent metaphors, complex connections and linguistic flourishes
Washington Post