Reconnaissance: Poems by Carl Phillips

Reconnaissance: Poems by Carl Phillips

A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most respected poets

. . .There's
a trembling inside the both of us,
there's a trembling, inside us both

The territory of Reconnaissance is one where morals threaten to become merely "what the light falls through," "suffering [seems] in fact for nothing," and maybe "all we do is all we can do." In the face of this, Carl Phillips, reconsidering and unraveling what we think we know, maps out the contours of a world in revision, where truth lies captured at one moment and at the next goes free, transformed. These are poems of searing beauty, lit by hope and shadowed by it, from a poet whose work "reinstates the possibility of finding meaning in a world that is forever ready to revoke the sources of meaning in our lives" (Jonathan Farmer, Slate).

Carl Phillips is an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 2010, Louis has been a judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Wild Is the Wind and Pale Colors in a Vast Field are two of his poetry collections.