Scattered Snows, to the North

By: Carl Phillips

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024-08-06

<p><b>An arresting study of memory, perception, and the human condition, from the Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips.</b> <br><br>Carl Phillips’s <i>Scattered Snows, to the North</i> is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that’s based on human memory. If the poet’s last few books have concerned themselves with power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the usefulness of embracing it and of releasing ourselves from the need to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it happen? If we believe it didn’t, does that make our belief true? <br><br>In<i> Scattered Snows, to the North</i>, Phillips looks though the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition—“Tears / were tears,” mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn’t, the way people live until they don’t. And there was also joy. And beauty. “<i>Yet the world’s still</i> / <i>so beautiful</i> . . . <i>Sometimes</i> // <i>it is</i> . . .” And it was enough. And it still can be.</p>