Reading & Conversation with Carl Phillips!

A few days ago I got to do an event with one of my poetry heroes Carl Phillips, in celebration of his latest book, Then the War & Selected Poems (FSG), hosted by Elliott Bay Book Company. If you missed it, there is now a recording you can watch, here. We read poems and then we talk a bit about driving impulses behind the book, individuation, ekphrasis, and Essex Hemphill.

Even if you already own many of Carl Phillips's previous books, I highly recommend buying Then the War. It comes with an entirely new collection of poems, which includes some of Carl's best work to date. There's a lyric prose memoir section, a stunning long poem, an ekphrastic poem after Alma Thomas—so much that feels like a deepening and a stretching of Carl's irreplicable aesthetic.