Praise for Reconnaissance
“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.” —Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post
"[Phillips's] poems are driven by the desire to transform truth into beauty. Yet they are scrupulous in their acknowledgement that the truth has, more often than not, been left behind . . . He makes extraordinary beauty true by acknowledging that the beauty we long for is often unreal." —Jonathan Farmer, Slate
"What we’re being asked to jettison in Reconnaissance is that cool innocence and, in its place, Phillips is daring us—through his own extravagant reckoning—to contend with those wild forces galloping in us, those we try to hold on and ride and those we are—sometimes beautifully—trampled by." —Scout
"One of the country's most talented poets and sentence-weavers." —Saeed Jones, Advocate
“A characteristically bold and beautiful collection from this brilliant lyricist.” —Booklist
“Phillips, who has always wrestled gracefully with human longing, confronted solitude in his most recent collection, Silverchest, an LJ Best Poetry Book. Now he confronts a world that's constantly redefining itself, faster and faster, a world where the truth can't be neatly pinned. Never mind that 'There's a trembling inside the both of us, there's a trembling, inside us both,' these are still finally poems alight with hope.” —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Praise for Carl Phillips
“I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences, and he is not primarily a prose writer: the American poet Carl Phillips . . . Like Emily Dickinson, Phillips is always taking in the minute metamorphoses of his surroundings (Dickinson's ‘Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons') as a way of measuring his own ‘internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are.' . . . But he is not a loner; he is, instead, a poet of erotic life as scored for solo contemplation.” —Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker