“Carl Phillips has forged an entire poetry career in describing the nuance of emotional states, finding and naming that wilderness of layered feelings that inscribe the truest experiences...” - Los Angeles Review of Books
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“I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences and it is not primarily a prose writer: the American poet Carl Phillips… Phillip’s [sic] style has been remarkably consistent from volume to volume, upsetting our easy assumption that great artists evolve from phase to phase...” - The New Yorker
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“Carl Phillips creates smooth currents of language that begin in one place, subtly shift direction and then shift again… The sounds and rhythms of these poems are gorgeous, and Phillips, whose awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, isn’t afraid to ask unsettling questions...” - The Washington Post
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“Since the publication of his first book, In the Blood (1992), Carl Phillips has generated a body of poetry that is singular for its demanding intimacy, its descriptions of the dissonant energies within a self, and its beauty” -The Paris Review
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“During a time when much of American poetry is criticized for being poetry lite, Phillips can move us in a single poem from complete joy to utter heartbreak” - The Rumpus
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“For Phillips, [his style] has consisted of a quivering, questing, lushly analytical syntax, with clauses of qualification and contradiction proliferating to the very edge of sense...” - West Branch Wired
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“[Phillips achieves] a delicately cadenced music entirely his own...” - Michigan Quarterly Review
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“For his books he has been awarded such prestigious honors as the Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress...” - Kenyon Review:
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“[Carl Phillips’] work has been honored with the Samuel French Morse Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Kingsley Tuft Poetry Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Currently, he teaches at Washington University in St. Louis...”- The Journal
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“In following, or being led by, [Phillips’] precise and sinuous lines, one is always aware of and often surprised by the dangers encountered, the illusions, the false steps inherent in such a journey. His work is meditative on the most essential, most elemental aspects of existence, both high and low, earthy and graceful. We are led to the edge of the unknown and then challenged as to why we followed: What was it we hoped to find?” – BOMB
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“[Phillips] is a prolific writer, which would be tolerable if the books weren’t individually and collectively brilliant. As a poet and essayist, it’s no exaggeration to say he’s one of the very most influential, critically admired, and important poets of his generation. No one but [Phillips]sounds like [Phillips]. Imitators wash up on the shore of his distinctive extended syntax, his uncanny concretizing of abstract states-of-being, as well as the usefully obsessive, sacred/erotic conundrum that underpins both the poems and the essays...” - The Best American Poetry Blog
