Cortege

Praise for "In the Blood"
"An astonishing debut by an African-American poet with mandarin grace and surpassing elegance of form married to unflinchingly bold and discerning content. Phillips refuses to write what might be expected of him on any subject, whether it's gender, race, faith, or morality. His reticence, his refusal of polemic, remind me sometimes of the young James Merrill, even of Auden."--Marilyn Hacker
Priase for "Cortege"
"""Carl Phillips is a poet of eros, but for him eros isn't simply sex, or even sexual desire sublimated into social ritual, or art, or any of the overdetermined ploys by which all of us, men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, attempt to close the distance between ourselves and others. Rather, eros is the never ending struggle, as he puts it, 'to fill a space in so there's no room left for awhile for what he surely calls a suffering inside him.' In the intricacies of thinking and feeling enacted in every poem of "Cortege," no feeling ever quite escapes its opposite--the joy of fulfilled desire is infused with the isolation it has momentarily eclipsed, the heaven of intimacy only heightens 'how it feels to be stranded.' "Cortege" is a book that has been packed in salt: the durable salt of artistic making, and the bitter salt of longing. Few other poets writing today can track so well, so unforgettably, the estranging spaces in the heart of love, the perils of beauty or the beauty of peril."--Alan Shapiro
"Out so much farther than our present pieties, attentive to no social or sentimental voice, only passion's (so often ruinous, defiant of upshot), it is not in every case, every poem, that Carl Phillips triumphs over my timidity. Aswith Sappho and Pasolini, though, traces of the winged god are everywhere unmistakable, even when this new poet has kicked them over: it is a sacred entail his harsh graces make. I for one am an awed (if lacerated) heir."--Richard Howard
Carl Phillips is author of "In the