An invaluable companion for writers at every stage of their journey to make the writing life a more complex and cooperative ventureIn this intimate and eloquent meditation, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has learned about what he calls an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered,” through forty years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers. He weaves together his experiences as a poet and prose writer with discussions of undere...

A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most respected poetsThere'sa trembling inside the both of us,there's a trembling, inside us both.The territory of Reconnaissance is one where morals threaten to become merely "what the light falls through," "suffering [seems] in fact for nothing," and "all we do is maybe all we can do." In the face of this, Carl Phillips, reconsidering and unraveling what we think we know, ...

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poetry: A Luminous Journey of Self-Discovery"I'm a song, changing. I'm a lightrain falling through a vastdarkness toward a differentdarkness."In his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Then the War, celebrated American poet Carl Phillips continues his ongoing quest of self-discovery and exploration. Written amidst rising racial conflict and uncertainty in the United States, these poems delve deeper into ...

A new edition of the first book of poems from the Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips, with a new afterword.*I am no mystic. I knownothing rises that doesn’tknow how to already.In my ears, only the clubbedfoot of routine, no voices, noclatter of dreams: but I sawwhat I saw*Even in his first book of poems, the deep contradictions in Carl Phillips’s work are already pronounced. Here is a subtle poet, attuned to the s...

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, wit...

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 ...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2023Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007–2020 is two books in one: a representative selection from seven of Carl Phillips's innovative earlier collections and a complete new book of poems, providing a powerful introduction to European readers. A seemingly gentle but resolute attention to the things of this world evokes the joyful and painful elements in the contemporary human condition, characterised by loneliness a...

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeA 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, exa...

Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2025Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award 2024A New York Times Poetry Book of the Year 2024Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowledge that's rooted in (always unstable) human memory. If the poet's recent books have been engaged w...

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 writingIn 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 imagina...

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, beli...

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 helets each go, the wind carrying most of it,some of the words, falling, settling intoinstead that larger darkness, where the smallerdarknes...