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Carl Phillips

  • About
  • Reviews
  • Awards
  • 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.


    Author photo taken by Reston Allen.




     'A beautiful book... There's a constant slippage between the tenor and the vehicle of metaphors, such that objects of abstract comparison feel as real as the real.'

    Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times
     'Phillips is a classicist-poet in the vein of Hopkins, whose instruction by Hill offered a language of devotion that he could apply toward desire, love, and contemplation. His myriad devotions--€”to nature, to sex, and to truth--are no less prayerful than those of religious believers. The result is a poet whose work carries sublimity and timelessness, and whose syntax carries an ancient strangeness and heft.'

    Nick Ripatrazone, Poetry Foundation
    'This is the best that poetry offers -€“ earthly but not earthbound, self-aware yet never self-indulgent, philosophical but with a firm awareness of emotional puzzlement. Phillips has an unparalleled gift for teasing out the peculiarity of grammar and syntax; his breath-long, branching lines move in an unpredictable pattern that keeps our hearts stopping and racing. Open-minded, erudite and deeply moving, this book of love and memory will withstand years of rereading.'

    Kit Fan, The Guardian
    'Perhaps no poet has sought so hard and so long, in such a variety of grammatical forms, for ways to depict such familiar situations - a hookup, a breakup, a wish to turn back time.'

    Stephanie Burt, The New York Times

    'In Carl Phillips's ravishing new collection, the elegiacal vision, still haunted by an erotics of loss has become enraptured with belatedness... in sinuous complexes of metaphor that revive experiences through the glamour, renegade, melancholy, of their ruins.'

    David Woo, LitHub


    '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
    Awards won by Carl Phillips Short-listed, 2024 The T.S. Eliot Prize (Scattered Snows, to the North) Winner, 2023 The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
    (Then the War)
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