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...

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 masterful new collection by one of our most important contemporary lyric poetsWind as a face gone red with blowing,oceans whose end is broken stitchery--swim of sea-dragon, dolphin,shimmer-and-coil, invitation. . . . You Knowthe kind of map I mean. Countries asdistant as they are believable . . .--from "Halo"Carl Phillips lyric explorations of longing and devotion, castigation and mercy, are unrivaled in contemporar...

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, ...

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 ...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 woundedanimal that, nevertheless, stillis conscious,you can seestraight through the openeye to where instinct falters becausefor once it has comedivided"--from "Chamber Music"I...

A new book of poems from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips.Is this who I must be,or maybe justwhat I am?“Sir” is an honorific, a title that indicates the superiority of its recipient, the subordination of its speaker. Carl Phillips’s SIR examines power and submission, abandon and restraint, whether in our personal, intimate relationships with others and ourselves, or in our relationships with such abstract masters...

The Spring 2021 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”As guest-editor Laura van den Berg writes in her introduction, “At its core, literatu...