About this item
A 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, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past's capacity both to teach and to mislead us -- also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love's fallout. How "to say no to despair"? How to take perhaps that greatest risk, the risk of believing in what offers no guarantee? These poems that, in their wedding of the philosophical, meditative, and lyric modes, mark a new stage in Phillips's remarkable work, stand as further proof that "if Carl Phillips had not come onto the scene, we would have needed to invent him.
About the Author
is the highly acclaimed author of 10 collections of poetry. He was born in 1959 to an Air Force family, who moved regularly throughout his childhood, until finally settling in his high-school years at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Boston University and taught high-school Latin for eight years. His first book, , won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was heralded as the work of an outstanding newcomer in the field of contemporary poetry. His other books are (1995) , a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; (1998) , a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; (2000) , winner of the Lambda Literary Award; , (2001) , winner of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; , a 2004 National Book Award finalist, for which Phillips also won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry; (2007) ; and (2009) , a 2009 National Book Award finalist. Two additional titles were published in the 2003-04 academic year: a translation of Sophocles' came out in September 2003, and a book of essays, , was published in May 2004. Phillips is the recipient of, among others, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Foundation Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such publications as , and , as well as in anthologies, including eight times in the series, , and . He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. He is a Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.
