Then the War

By: Carl Phillips

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023-02-14

<p><b>WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY</b><br><b><br>A new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips's <i>Then the War</i><br><br></b><i>I’m a song, changing. I’m a light</i><br> <i>rain falling through a vast</i><br><br> <i>darkness toward a different</i><br> <i>darkness.</i><br><br>Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an “ongoing quest”; <i>Then the War</i> is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started. <br><br><i>Then the War</i> includes a generous selection of Phillips’s work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and his chapbook, <i>Star Map with Action </i><i>Figures</i>.<br><br>Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. <i>Then </i><i>the War </i>is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.</p>