About this item
WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRYA new collection of poems from one of Americas most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillipss Then the War. Im a song, changing. Im a light rain falling through a vast. darkness toward a different darkness.. Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an "ongoing quest"; Then the War 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. . Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillipss 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.
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.
