“This 10th book from the prolific Phillips is a quiet yet wounded reflection on Phillips’ signature subjects: relationships, distances, identity, and damage. Phillips’ remarkable ability to be clear yet illusive, as well as his dizzying syntax, are ever- present as the poems coil into places of confusion: ‘Oh, sometimes it is as if desire had been given form, and / acreage, and I'd been left for lost there. Amazement grips me, / I grip it back.’ Rendering visceral moments with surprising leisure, ‘like blood with a drawl to it,’ Phillips searches slowly but relentlessly for answers to unanswerable questions: ‘who’s to say what will not be useful?’ . . . this collection is more evidence that Phillips is making good on his offer to ‘show you what it looks like / when surrender, and an instinct not to, run side by side.’”—Publishers Weekly
“Theme and style join perfectly in Speak Low . . . In poem after poem, the speaker turns to address questions of power. The style of the poems, as they frame and shape these questions, feels at once pliant and masterful . . . As in Rilke, Phillips' lines give his language a near-sculptural form, something like a fountain. The poems are structures of alternating firmness and give, as the sense spills from line to line.”—Jenny Mueller, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Singing the music of mythology, history and philosophy, [Phillips’s] poems are delicately crafted to sound like common speech even though there is nothing pedestrian about them. Because of their dexterity, they are approachable without sacrificing their loftier aspirations.”—Dionisio Martinez, The Miami Herald
