WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
A new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips's
Then the War
I’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”;
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 attendant 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 we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started.
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 refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and 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.