Carl Phillips’s IN THE BLOOD (1995)
Edited by Shara Lessley
“A Sensitive Wisdom, A Quality”: A New Edition of a Pulitzer Prize Winner’s Debut
That Carl Phillips is an outlier within the context of “This Long Winding Line” feels apt: his is the first book since launching this series in 2020 that I hadn’t previously read. Granted, since first devouring Pastoral and The Tether in the early 2000s, as well as his subsequent titles, I’ve been drawn to Phillips’s lyric vacillation between ambiguity and explicitness, his gift for satisfying syntactic expectation not with what is conclusive but ultimately irresolvable, as well as his extraordinary ability to privilege the intimate processes of feeling and thought over dramatic occasion. Widely admired for his vivid evocation of eros and his honing in on the dialectical, Phillips isn’t underread, nor is his work at risk of disappearing within readerly circles of poetry. Thus, FSG’s rerelease of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s In the Blood provides an opportunity to go back in time, to consider Phillips’s debut as a means of tracing the origin story of one of our most radiant contemporary poets.
Although the collection reveals some formal surprises (see “Birdland,” a sestina!), In the Blood also delivers what faithful readers expect; that is, wisdom that’s arrived at indirectly as a result of meticulous consideration. As in Phillips’s wider oeuvre, the majority of poems in In the Blood don’t proceed by easy leaps or plot-based linearity, but by a concentrated probing of feeling and thought. “You know better,” Phillips writes in “Death of the Sibyl,” “Your body isn’t the restive field it was, / clouds share none of the marbled indifference // of statues, whose absent limbs and dark-socketed / heads once triggered desire […]” Here are early examples of Phillips’s signature negotiations, his teasing out of the intersections between desire and intellect, embodiment and art. Even as its title gestures toward the clairvoyant—the “sibyl” figure as prophetess—the poem resists what’s revelatory. The oracle is dead after all, according to the title, and the opening stanza confirms that “There are no visions.” Yet, by pursuing a wandering line of thought, the speaker posits that, rather than what’s preordained, rooms of self-determination exist. In these, one is free to “touch [their] own / flesh or not, to nobody’s direction, grip / sheets in [their] mouth and know passion is // little more than a wound to be straddled.”
Phillips’s turn from the imagination to bodily desire to knowing feels like natural lyric progression. Yet, “Death of the Sibyl” pushes past this familiar structure and introduces five additional lines in which the poem’s solitary speaker is left listening to “the rush of whole lives passing / elsewhere …” Despite evidence that the world is happening without him, the speaker defiantly maintains that he hasn’t “been entirely abandoned.” Unlike many writers who labor toward what reads like some predestined discovery (in this case, the penultimate declarative that “passion is // little more than a wound”), Phillips moves beyond rhetoric toward the uncertain. In “Death of the Sibyl,” as in his most surprising later work, the poem’s conditions of mystery and possibility aren’t necessarily clarified, but fortified or suspended. What readers experience, then, is private instinct laid bare. In addressing a particular dilemma, the uncanny elements of interiority lend Phillips’s poems their lasting resonance: the pleasure of action versus consensus—thinking’s complex processes carefully coaxed to the forefront.
It’s slightly strange, perhaps, to admit that I crave Phillips’s sentences; particularly how their arrangements enact ideas, or mirror spiritual engagement and pathos. In the Blood reveals Phillips as poet of conjunctions—and, but, as for, nor, or—and rhetorical markers—if, while, but—even in his earliest work. He is also a muscular sentence-builder whose complex phrasing both intellectualizes and eroticizes its subjects. Via elongation, as well as breathtaking turns and counterturns, Phillips utilizes syntactic delay as a means of clarification, yes, but also of facilitating suspense and gratification. The arrangement and accumulation of Phillips’s lines suggest a steadfast interest in interconnectedness, causality, and the correlative. “Leda, After the Swan,” for example, unsettles myth in two sentences that unspool over nine stanzas. Unlike those third-person accounts by by Rilke, Lawrence, or H.D., Phillips adopts a persona that shrinks the distance between violence, ambivalence, and personal experience. While Yeats’s famous sonnet on Leda speaks to the crisis of colonial power and Irish nationality, Phillips’s conundrum isn’t assault as civic symbol. Instead, the poem’s main drama is the mind as it confronts the aftereffects of a disconcerting event; that is, the seduction and rape of mortal Leda by the god Zeus, who’s disguised himself as a bird.
“Perhaps,” the poem begins, Phillips’s one-line adverb underscoring his interest in that which is tentative, “in the exaggerated grace / of his weight / settling, // the wings / raised, held in / strike-or-embrace, / position // I recognized / something more / than swan, I can’t say.” These lines render Leda’s psychological vacillation between stunned clarity and confusion. The aggressive precision of the action (strike-or-embrace, his weight settling, the wings raised) undercuts the beauty of internal rhyme (grace, embrace, say) and further echoes the speaker’s inner conflict. Patterns of diction later pitch from perception (recognized, defined, remember) to the ethereal (color, feathers, forever, hour), and further emphasize Leda’s struggle to reconcile physical and emotional collisions. For all its elegant sounds and imagery, however, the poem eerily renders the precise moment Leda’s reality comes apart:
Paraphrasing or analyzing Phillips’s ornate syntax is sometimes like trying to transcribe the symmetrical asymmetry of Bernini’s David—if the sculpture were animated. In sharing only part of a Phillips poem, there’s no question that some of its power is lost. The above excerpt, for instance, moves startingly elsewhere, leading Leda to encounter
These phrases brim with qualifications. The poet’s ravens are “neither / black nor blue.” They’re not just the color of sorrow either, but “the precise color of / sorrow in good light…” (emphasis mine). Taken together, the stanzas seem to provide an arresting ending, the em dash at line’s end working hard to enact the eternity that precedes it, i.e., “the hour forever, / […] half-stepping” Yet, Phillips adds one last and contradictory entry to Leda’s testimony, a single quatrain in which her sense of time speeds up, reflecting the assault’s dizzying effects and ongoing disorientation:
In the final stanza, “then” serves as a second volta, one that extends Leda’s self-reflection. With a single word on a solitary line, Phillips infuses the poem with both climax and anti-climax. Readers now understand that every hour in “Leda, After the Swan” simultaneously lasts forever and speeds up, the encounter with Zeus both frozen in time and outside of it. And doesn’t the poem’s buried structure suggest as much? Its first sentence begins with an adverb; its second sentence introduces a summation that later turns, once more, via a final conjunctive adverb. Together, the sequence of this diction reveals the poem’s central argument: Perhaps, there was just, then… In other words, the drama of Leda’s life post-swan in a nutshell.
Almost thirty-five years after Rachel Hadas first selected In the Blood for the Morse Poetry Prize, it is my sincere pleasure to share the following essays by James Allen Hall, Cate Lycurgus, Derrick Austin, and David Woo. While varied in observation and approach, their criticism offers fresh insight on Phillips’s work within the context of sexual identity and politics in the early 90s, as well as the layered silence of the AIDS epidemic. The essays also illuminate In the Blood as an early marker of what has become the poet’s signature focus on the interplay between thought and desire, and the syntactic power of conclusions deferred. In the book’s afterword, Phillips describes his admiration for contemporaries (Lucie Brock-Broido, Marie Howe, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly, specifically) who variously “harness vulnerability of experience to urgency” in order to make “readers recognize themselves in a sensibility that isn’t theirs at all.” After admiring and studying his work for more than two and a half decades, I believe In the Blood offers yet another layer of recognition: Phillips’s debut serving as the first indicator of his future as a commanding force in lyric poetry.
—Shara Lessley, Editor-at-Large
Virginia, June 2026
The Epistemology of the Open Field
James Allen Hall
Some books mark you. You remember who you were when you devoured them: where you were, what you were wearing, the sensation of being inside and outside of your body. In the Blood was the overcold office where I was a dispatcher in 1998, the year I encountered Carl Phillips’s book. I loved holding it, tracing the red patterns. The book’s face: bright yellow textured cover papers that felt heavy and warm to touch. The book felt intimate, vivid—as did the poems enclosed within. I mean, I recognized the intensity of the poems’ interiors. Or, as the speaker of “evangels” says: “the body finds / in its own / aboriginal coil / all it needs, finally, / of blood and the gospel.” I recognized that voice, the one that seeks legibility by following the coil, no matter how tightly wound or wounded, to the body’s natural instinct, the gospel it can’t help but to sing out. “I’ve often said that my first book outed me,” Carl Phillips writes in the new afterword to In the Blood. “Maybe it’s truer to say that the poems were a way for me to write myself into a space where queerness was simply a fact, not a condemnation, not a reason to die.”
In the Blood first appeared in 1992. The 1990s were a watershed decade for queer culture, but physical and psychological spaces in America were still marked by secrecy and code. In 1992, queerness was largely played for laughs and /or punishments. We had yet to see Tom Hanks win an Academy Award for portraying an AIDS-afflicted lawyer in Philadelphia (1993). We had not yet boarded Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), or written our thanks To Wong Foo (1995). We were Bound (1996)and not yet freed from The Birdcage (1996): we were still mostly In & Out (1997), reminding ourselves that Boys Don’t Cry (1999). In 1992, The South Florida Gay News printed only its acronym on its front page. It also took great pains to ensure that none of the headlines used outing language like “Gay” or “Lesbian.” These were words that still had blood on and risk to them. In 1998, for instance, it was very much news when San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter led with this headline, all in red: “No obits.” For the first week since AIDS arrived in 1982, the paper reported zero deaths due to AIDS-related illness.
We were, I’m trying to say, still a closeted culture which doubted desire’s innateness; what most people thought about queerness was that it was fatal.
In 1995, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s book The Epistemology of the Closet helped to unhinge the doors, arguing as it did that “the closet” itself was not just a matter of “keeping secrets,” but instead a machine by which power dichotomized heterosexual identity by aligning it with public, respectable discourse. Which of course depended on identifying the queer as private and abject discourse. The language of the homosexual would only be deployed when we needed to describe criminal, shameful, perverted, or abhorrent practice. Real people were heterosexuals; real sex was heterosexual sex. “Who’s the man and who’s the woman?” “But how do you do it?” If I had a nickel for every time I’ve explained: “Just like you, but better,” I’d be an enthroned queen indeed. Queers were not just perverted: we were bad copies, printed askew, faded …. And the closet was the fulcrum by which one side of the teeter-totter raised as the other, weighted, sank.
And yet, inside the closet: you can’t imagine how many furs, how many fabulous shoes—the material reality of an imagination that was coiled against “the real.” “Just so with coming out,” Sedgwick writes. The closet, she says, is “not as a vacuum or … the blank it can pretend to be,” but is instead “a weighty and occupied and consequential epistemological space.” “Leave every room its share / of dark corners,” Phillips writes in “Life Lessons from Art,” the book’s third poem. “If there are windows, / they are only to show some emblem / of the world you have chosen / largely to ignore, a plow, or a ship / […] skies doubling as the pasty brow of God.” Inside the darker room (I won’t say “closet”) in “Life Lessons from Art,” the body is “the primary source of light.” Here in the dark interior, the body glows. I imagine a body with light both emanating from it and landing on it—as both subject and object of illumination. Outside, through the windows, we see those “emblems” of propagation and transport, of a not-entirely-healthy “pasty” God, whose presence is so far removed, that the god must act through its double, its copy.
The poem imagines a “newly married couple” that can be assumed to be heterosexual. (The first country to legalize gay marriage was The Netherlands, ten years after In the Blood was published.) The speaker instructs makers of art and life: “Include your reflection / in the doorknob / … / anywhere they’ll think to look last.” Or, as the speaker of “With Love for the Night Patrol” puts it: “when ascending is / the only right move and you know it, you know / / you’re in the part nobody reads.”
The best art, the best life, is made in shadow—shadow, without which luminous intensity cannot exist.
It seems every time I turn around, poets want to talk only about the use of syntax in Phillips’s work. And not just other poets. The last time I saw Phillips read, he also gave a craft lecture on syntax and the role it plays in modulating distance and emotional stance.
I’m interested in what the syntax is doing in poems, too; but so often the conversation about syntax remains micro-focused and doesn’t consider context. The speakers in In the Blood turn so often, pausing to catch breath or wait for the listener, delaying for verb, modifying levels of certainty, qualifying observations and feelings, redoubling on an assertion, rowing against the tide of the sentence, providing resistance, or, as the speaker of “Mix” might say: the speaker is “anything all but sure, a good deal / the sweeter than sweet it always / tastes like, just before closure ….”
A sentence is one way of enclosing subject and verb. Sentence descends from the Middle English, derived from Latin by way of Old French, for “way of thinking, opinion”—in use since the twelfth century. Two hundred years later, our “way of thinking” became wedded to words, to “an indefinite portion of discourse or writing; a passage,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Only fifty years after that, around 1447, “sentence” meant more or less its modern use: “a series of words in connected speech or writing.” But it can’t escape its origins: to judge, to condemn.
And the line: the nail file in the cake, the way of breaking out of the sentence. Why not occlude opinion and allow possibility—allow for “passage,” and “way” for thought?
So often, In the Blood utilizes delay to wrap and warp time. “Later,” the speaker begins the poem “Mix.” “Much later,” the speaker in “Still Life: Treadmill with Mirror” says. In doing so, Phillips encloses the time of the poem inside other senses of time, so that interiority takes place in an ongoingness, divorcing itself from exterior time but still in relation to it. Or, to put it another way: it mainstreams interior temporalities while marginalizing, pushing away, ordinary (read: straight) time. This is the mastery of the lyric mode, “the hour forever, / it seemed, half-stepping / its way elsewhere— / / then / everything, I / remember, began / happening more quickly” (“Leda, After the Swan”).
And yet there are—of course there are—short declarative sentences and assertions throughout In the Blood. But taken with interruptive, periodic, prefatory, hypotactic syntaxes, these moments of assertion feel like they have movement too: places where the leap lands, coiled to spring again. “There are no visions,” the speaker of “Death of the Sibyl” says, ending the first stanza. “Stones do not matter,” starts off a section in the final poem. “These are simply the facts as we have them, ma’am,” ends “The man we’re looking for.” Rarely do we get a double-declarative, but notably “Holy, Holy” ends: “You keep meaning to ask what all the fuss is about. / You return the nightstand to its original position.” As if commenting on the declarative mode, though, the speaker of “Africa Says” tells us: “These will get you only so far.”
That the syntactical mode is shapelier, more varied, more interested in discursiveness, marks the poet’s interest not in the closet door, but in the doorknob where we’re instructed to leave our reflection in “Life Lessons from Art.” No other poet in our language makes better use of ellipsis, for instance, as a transition. (I’ve always found it beautiful that Phillips’s ellipses are only three dots, always forgoing the fourth one that denotes the sentence’s stop.) For there is no poem in the book that doesn’t use a gerund, that does not slip from past, present, and future into action that is still in the middle, refusing to acknowledge the paradigm of beginning or ending.
We are always arriving, in In the Blood, “the two of us / dissolving, as the door falls down.”
Known to Unknow: On the Early Poems
Cate Lycurgus
New to poetry in the 2010s, I first encountered Carl Phillips’s work in Double Shadow and Silverchest amidst the onslaught of graduate reading. Because I’d entered a writing program without an English degree, I lacked the historical or canonical context to make grander observations and initially relied on close reading. After several months, I learned to recognize poetic lineages, intertextual influences, and references more broadly, be they pop or mythology; in time I could (loosely) hold in mind what I knew of a writer’s life. However, I also noticed that the more I gravitated to a poem—for its insistence that I look again, see the world or myself newly; for phrases that surprised yet resounded true; for pursuit of the ineffable, inexpressible—the less I could say about it. This speechlessness occurred with almost every Phillips piece I read: I’d be right there, sound and syntax and image all clicking into place like a cosmic scaffold coming together to reveal how the sky is built, only for a wind to descend and scatter comprehension to the birds, leaving me that sky of “watered gin” (“The Conditioning Trick: Home Method”).
This could be failure on the part of the reader (possibly) or the poet (highly unlikely, in this case) or it might say more about the inadequacy of language itself: what an imperfect tool it is to witness, let alone make sense of, our limited experience within a limitless cosmos. I trust what Phillips crafts: when first enamored with The Rest of Love, I lost myself in it, retracing the interrupted tercets and their overt interrogations, learning to unknow so as to move forward. I was drawn to the voice confirming us as spiritual beings having a physical experience, one Phillips plumbs for excruciating entanglements, not least mortality’s bind. Sometime in the years of intense caregiving, as my father became less himself and I less sure what if any life existed for me, besides this, I recall finding the poem “Gold Leaf” and, in part because Phillips suggests so, saying “no” to despair. I believed him, even in his recently reissued first collection, In the Blood, when he attests “perhaps you are precisely that age / when a writer means, finally, / all that he says” (title poem).
If some meaning evades me, I trust the speaker is in good faith. Which is critical given how often I’m muddling through mystery or incongruity. And Phillips’s poems have plenty of these; in his work we’re typically led by a speaker who is vulnerable in argument and emotion, but less so in context or particulars. Which is why In the Blood stuns me: what uncharacteristic transparency. Of course, throughout the collection, we still witness Phillips’s hallmark allusions, though art and myth work less as veil than scrim. There are hints of denotative and etymological explorations, like “Wonderful / as in / truly replete with wonder,” (“evangels”) that increasingly pepper later collections, and we find no shortage of Phillips’s telltale syntax, muscling through the complexities of cause-and-effect, time, contrast.
While I’ve never thought of (or particularly liked) poems as puzzles, crafted by a poet for readers to decipher, I do believe the most powerful poems engage with mystery in some way. They may destabilize what I thought I knew, court contradiction, or introduce uncertainty, and, they often delight via sound and sense. In this book, the opening poem “X” does many of these things, foregrounding the unknown. “X” paradoxically begins with an ending: the “knife and fork / laid across one another / to say done,” before Phillips describes X in a different way, as the “loose / stitch of beginners.” Couplets leap via imagistic thread to newlyweds’ lovemaking (“grinding,” actually) and their puckered lips turned wounds; it is then through a cascade of crossover images that we come to understand satiation not as the end of hunger but as place-holder for the next iteration, one that reconfigures endlessly.
In his debut, Phillips’s poems build by image, as in the second sentence of the aforementioned poem where any body becomes “your / / body scaling whatever / fence of chain-metal Xs / / desire throws up”; here an actual fence visually links the barrier of unknown and mutable desires (or perhaps unknown because they are mutable) with the X of annihilation (“what / your spreadeagled limbs / suggest, falling …”) that may result from conquering, erasing them. In other words, we want to remain in a place of want.
And I want to remain in the mind of the poem; at every turn, Phillips demonstrates a priceless capacity of poetry: to hold duality, outright paradox. In the penultimate line Phillips writes, “X”—in turn uncertainty or convergence—“is all I keep.” This itself would be a rich enough landing, yet Phillips isn’t finished. With a final enjambed and uncoupled line, we learn “X is all I keep / / meaning to cross out.” The complete reversal of sentiment, or the way it recasts previous lines (note intention but not action—meaning to cross out, not crossing out) enacts the unresolvable paradoxes of longing and being known.
In the Blood is also shockingly frank. In its afterword Phillips shares how he had to attempt each poetic form to find his free-verse voice; similarly, the collection does some contextual explication of mixed-race identity in “Blue,” with “the white that is nothing so much as / blue, and the black that is, finally, nothing / I am the man neither of you remembers”; or class in “Miserere,” with “I thought to be thankful / for all the work the world, in torn / skyfuls, brings us, and how / O somebody, somebody, as / they say, must do it”; or the intersection of sexual violence, desire, and power in “For Chiron,” which opens “Nothing expected hurts /as it otherwise should, so / no, you did not hurt, Professor, / / even that first time.” Even before reading the afterword, one can’t help but to feel he is baring this so he can bear it.
My own work comes from a lifetime of bearing what I cannot change, and trying to find radiance, despite. It arises from a place of precarity. With a father severely ill and fully paralyzed since my childhood, surrender—of plans, of control, of understanding, of self—has defined my life and writing. Persisting alongside disability and disease for decades of care has meant the ability to hold uncertainty, temporality, and paradox as a matter of survival.
How else to sit with a body failing to house its spirit, crumbling in new ways, daily? Or long for release from what has shaped you? How else to witness the divine right here, sacred couched in the profane; or to see whatever we hold flee, and faster, the tighter the fist?
In his reflection at the end of this rerelease, Phillips writes of his poems as places to “give useful narrative to experiences I can’t otherwise make peace with … more about writing myself free, if only temporarily, from what [I] felt must destroy me.” He admits this observation sounds unfashionable and dramatic, but I get it. If you do not write, if you do not try to shape what is incomprehensible, excruciating, or beyond the pale into some other form, you risk silence, which is a type of acquiescence to whatever X the world decides will be your annihilation. In the face of all I cannot know or solve, I’ve come to believe the only thing I can truly offer is attention. And attending requires presence.
We see this at the collection’s other bookend when, in the titular poem, the speaker contemplates his own mortality and desires. The final impulse is one of attention, as the poem insists,
The hand keeps wanting to touch and does—keeps reaching out for communion, consummation, confirmation, even, of the indelible world as it marks us, as we make our mark. It was fascinating to read that Phillips sees this book as a narrative arc from “meaning to change oneself to reckoning with the fact that one is who one is.” I can see this; the poems make facets of Phillips’s life plain, “outing” himself, as he puts it. And yet by the end of the collection, I’m circling to the start, much as blood loops through the body to be reoxygenated, with X recast as a marker rather than a mark of erasure or anonymity—X as a site of possibility, a crux from which, over collections and decades, Phillips courts the unknown, a position of which I was so struck as a student that the speaker’s particulars didn’t matter so much. Or perhaps they didn’t later; maybe In the Blood had to betray him to allow Phillips to become known—not only to readers, but also himself.
My dad was totally paralyzed the last 25 years of his life. Whenever he needed to sign something official it was quite the ordeal: pen in mouth, paper raised close for him to make his mark. Looking at the shaky X, few knew who it stood for, let alone the life it encompassed. Yet one can be certain: whatever X forbade or condoned, whatever future it set in motion wouldn’t have been possible without the particular of dad.
In the Blood announces Phillips as a major talent, as Rachel Hadas’ introduction foretells, but it also asserts the intention to live, to continue looking, attending, puzzling through all that has no answer. Through his X-marks-the-spot, I-am-here insistence of In the Blood, Phillips crosses out oblivion. One must be here, must have survived to pick up a pen. Begin the next line.
A Way Forward
Derrick Austin
Remembering my earliest experience with Carl Phillips’s work, I see myself a college freshman in the stacks of the Tampa Public Library with a copy of Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006. I had been an avid reader of gay poetry blogs, an invaluable lifeline as a closeted teenager, and it must have been through one of those blogs—Christopher Hennessey’s or C. Dale Young’s or Reginald Shepherd’s—that I first heard the name Carl Phillips. I was unprepared for his introspective meditations compacted into short-lined, heavily enjambed lyric poems. I didn’t understand them, but I trusted their music. Like the writers I most admire, he made everyday language feel luminously charged. Sensuous and contemplative, they were everything I loved about poetry, and yet they were like nothing else I’d read. I had registered for my first poetry workshop, and I sought models that could teach me how to write. This was 2007 or 2008. Soon, social media would connect writers with ease across vast distances, allowing people to find community and kinship where once there was isolation. I had a hard time as a young writer, a Black queer writer, believing anyone would care to read my poems about Medieval art or the Gulf Coast. But I felt at home in Phillips’s poems, and they illuminated a way forward.
I can’t help but recognize glimmers, throughout In the Blood, of the work to come. The early poem “On the Notion of Tenderness in Wartime” brings to mind the ending of “Fixed Shadow, Moving Water” from 2023’s Then the War: “But if we make of tenderness a countervailing force, the two of us— / / If we can make, from tenderness, a revolution—”. Phillips’s signature syntax is present, as are the thrilling dismissive gestures that introduce humor and psychological tension: as when, in “Going Under,” after a hypotactic opening sentence sprawling the better part of two tercets, he writes “So what?” I remember how liberating it felt as a graduate student when I encountered a similar gesture in the opening lines of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” from 2014’s Silverchest: “I know a man who routinely asks / that I humiliate him. It’s sex, and it isn’t— / whatever.” I was a fastidious and self-consciously artful young writer, and that deft “whatever” taught me the value of utilizing demotic language in an understated, off-handed way.
I’m glad this new edition of Phillip’s debut will make it widely available to new readers. This was my first time reading the entirety of In the Blood, but I’ve encountered individual poems, such as the opener “X,” which concludes: “X is all I keep / meaning to cross out.” I’m fascinated by the styles and modes that will be crossed out in Phillips’s later work. Ekphrasis isn’t a mode I associate with him, yet art historical references abound: Manet, Delacroix, and Michelangelo, among others. My favorite poem in this vein, “Fra Lippo Lippi and the Vision of Henley,” a gorgeous meditation on what memories we bury in art and what memories art reawakens in us, moves with a kinetic, halting quality across five heavily enjambed tercets. This poem does what ekphrasis achieves at its best: confirms the place of art as not ancillary to or a simulacra of life but a part of daily lives.
I was also surprised to encounter a sestina. In the afterword, Phillips writes about a winter spent writing at least two of each form represented in John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason: “These were all just exercises, not poems; the only evidence left is the one sestina that I couldn’t let go of, ‘Birdland,’ one of the earliest-written poems in the book.” “Birdland” delighted me not least because it’s a fantastic sestina. The form beautifully accommodates Phillips’s style. Those winding sentences spill into each other, so the formal constraints are the last thing I notice. The poem begins assuredly with three assonance-heavy lines: “attention,” “arrival,” “arrive” in the first; “save” and “pair” buoyed in the second by a succession of sibilant s-sounds; “Affect,” “a,” and “natural” carry me through the third. This persona speaks about birdwatching with authority: “arrive naked, / save for a single rhinestoned pair of field / glasses.” It’s a delicious provocation like something out of a Derek Jarman movie. “Affect a perfectly natural interest / in ornithology, i.e. profess to know / the male when you see him” the speaker continues, highlighting the queerness and artifice of this moment in the same way as the pairing of “naked” and “natural.” Is being naked in a field affected or natural? Does carrying rhinestone field glasses make the nakedness more or less natural? Pairs and pairing emerges as a central topic: questions of similarity and difference; how two things can contradict each other or emphasize a point; the push-and-pull; yes, and; no, but. No two birds are the same, the poem tells us. Are we even talking about birds? The second and third stanzas provide a lesson in seduction:
Desire is not only thought through but enacted via music and diction. “Stir” building into “stirring” already satisfies but the way it draws out the “er” sound in “interest” and “remember” creates a sensuous purr. A gentle rhyme occurs between “liable” and “settle” just as a propulsive consonance marshals us through one stanza and into another: “believe,” “body,” “bloodless,” and “broadcasting.” The word “bloodless” contains such a charge, intimating both a corpse emptied of blood, a victim of grievous harm, and also an emotional bloodlessness, the “cool disinterest” that is essential in this poem’s terrain. Something winged coming down to earth puts me in mind of the Annunciation. From Mary to Leda and the Sibyl, annunciations of various kinds haunt In the Blood. What happens when the divine meets the human? What happens when you are chosen by something more powerful than you? What happens when desire or fear or self-loathing overwhelms? What violence? What pleasure?
“Birdland” concerns itself with vision, the pleasures of looking, of the roving eye, and the difficulty of seeing the world and self clearly. The birds know “what you’ve pretended all this time not to know,” which the poem tells us is a memory of two naked bodies in bed together. Though the bodies aren’t gendered, the collection clearly articulates an interest in same-sex desire. I’m profoundly moved by this frankness about sexuality. Phillips suggests Rachel Haddas, who selected In the Blood for publication, might have been drawn to the book’s queer themes because of her work organizing poetry workshops for gay men with AIDS. Those workshops led to the anthology Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop, which was published in 1991, the year Phillips submitted the manuscript. “I didn’t know of the anthology,” he writes. “I barely knew anything about AIDS; these were the Reagan years, the mere existence of AIDS was denied, all but absent from mainstream media, which was all I had access to in my small town in the pre-internet era.” I think of the context in which this book emerged. I think of the stigma and prejudice queer authors faced. I think of my closeted youth. I think of coming out in 2008, a 19-year-old college student taking poetry workshops who never once feared that the queer content of my poems would prevent my work from getting published or recognized. I’m indebted to Phillips and the queer writers before me whose labor allowed me to feel that bold and free on the page.
A Wound To Be Straddled
David Woo
“What you have achieved cannot mean more to others than it does to you,” Wittgenstein wrote. “Whatever it has cost you, that’s what they will pay.” A sense of personal cost pervades Carl Phillips’s poetry, and its achievement lies in its seduction of the reader into paying the price. That this cost is a moral one has been clear from the start. In the new afterword to In the Blood, Phillips writes that his debut poems arose from “a mostly subconscious impulse to live rather than succumb to a competing impulse to destroy what seemed monstrous in me, by destroying myself. I’ve written from necessity, rather than occasion, ever since.” At first, the necessity was the fundamental one of accepting his identity as a man attracted sexually to other men. To read In the Blood (1992) today is to see flashes of post-closet hindsight. “Elegy,” for example, is a vision of Eros in leather regalia, “cock heavy with travel,” “his / pink legs working whole crowds into longing,” the queer sensibility unmistakable. The paradox remains how a poet of such evident sensitivity to the fractured nuances of his own consciousness should find “monstrous,” to the point of self-destruction, what felt inherent and germinal.
If the reason for the paradox was clear—the abhorrence and proscription of gay sexuality, still widespread in the early AIDS era when the book was written—its expression was complex and inwardly fraught. Phillips’s poetry has always manifested an inner tension the poet refuses, by some steadfastness of personality or principle, to relax. Some of these self-sustaining tensions manifest themselves in In the Blood: between an aesthetic of reticence and austerity (“leave the bulk / of your work unsigned”) and the need, bordering on compulsion, for honest adherence to the profligacy of a particular consciousness [“and you tell yourself (already / growing hard again over the train’s / crosstown difficulties) / that everything counts”]; between an esteem for classical aesthetic ideals, such as the beauty of proportion and grandeur (“each its own epic, like the blade before it, / the fingers and power behind them / before that”), and a moral insistence, also classical, on the human truth of erotic ecstasy and extremity. “Leave every room its share / of dark corners,” he writes, in “Life Lessons from Art,” but “always, the flesh … should be the primary source of light,” presenting the story of his own body as an illumination for a benighted culture that only recently permitted someone like him, queer, biracial, African American, to emerge fully from the shadows. In doing so, Phillips’s early work connects him to the line of poets for whom the erotic is central, not only contemporaries like Thom Gunn and Reginald Shepherd, but, following an instinct for timelessness that averted canonical didacticism, those of other eras, from Cavafy and Donne back to the fragments of Sappho and Archilochos, who wrote, in Guy Davenport’s translation, “Like Odysseus under the ram / You have clung under your lovers / And under your love of lust, / Seeing nothing else for this mist, / Dark of heart, dark of mind.”
In “Death of the Sibyl,” Phillips peers into the dark mist of his heart and mind to train a penetrating light on the recalcitrance and perversity of Eros. His use of the Sibyl myth follows one method of his mature style, a conflation of ancient, “timeless” understandings of human nature with the present-day consciousness of the poet. The opening line is typical of the syntactical lilt of later Phillips, with the subordinate adverbial clause (“when it comes”) arriving after the subject, characteristically suggesting a mind stumbling into meaning:
The blow and slap of love’s roulette spin is a beautifully involute image of sexual reckoning, situating Eros in a realm of accident and brute force, with definition proceeding by negation, all visions nullified by the word “no.” The arrival of “the world”—perhaps the life that the speaker would want to lead—is equated with the attainment of love, the perspective less that of the Sibyl, who, after all, refused the god’s advances, than of a young person like Phillips for whom the drama of love remained central: “back / when sex was what mattered / most,” as he would call it in a later poem that mentions the Sibyl, “This Far In,” from Then the War (2022).
The prophetess in “Death of the Sibyl” exists in a modern space that verges on the timeless: no identifiably classical images, except limbless statuary as in a modern museum; half-eaten fruit that could be nature morte in a modern kitchen or an Ovidian culina; and the Sibyl wedged in some middle stage of eternity, still embodied, not yet a withered voice in an ampulla, as in Petronius. The expanse of the sky laps at the walled edges of the speaker’s room (“the blue stops here”), a private space in which the outside world intrudes as the unpeopled impositions of money and “jangled music,” as from a record player. The modern speaker conflates the monotony of the quotidian (“plates round and flat as an old, / unquestioned routine”) with the Sibyl’s endless, degenerative tedium.
To equate the Sibyl’s living death with a wounded eroticism—onanistic isolation without the “accidents” of love, Apollo turned away from his desire for her (“the backside of God”), “the rush of whole lives passing /elsewhere, without you”—is to prophesy what would happen emotionally if the poet continued with the life that he has since revealed he was experiencing at the time: the closet, the soon-to-be-broken marriage to a woman, sexual violation by another man. The violently carnal image of passion as “a wound to be straddled” may be one way of satisfying a moral desire for frankness without revealing details of his life. Even if the young poet had been aware of his “subconscious” impulses, the reticence and austerity that were also part of Phillips’s sensibility mediated against open admissions. From the start, vibrancy of meditative language rather than confessional assertion generated the kind of mystery that would seduce the reader he was searching for, one sensitive to emotional and intellectual nuance and willing to pay a challenging poem’s cost.
For a while, after In the Blood famously uncloseted him, Phillips would find a necessary darkness of heart and mind through liberation in a more direct sense, as the freedom to depict the furred undercarriage of gay desire, like Odysseus under the ram. In his next book, Cortège (1995), he writes:
While there would continue to be such moments of emancipatory explicitness in future books, the distance between these lines and his observations in In the Blood that a hand shake was “only one way of fucking in small, public spaces” or that “Ode on a Grecian Urn” could be summarized as “beauty, chasing tail forever” was always small, perhaps the length of the closet. If Phillips didn’t feel the need to emphasize this strain after Cortège, it was because a morally clarifying bluntness was an integral part of his sensibility. From the start he has shown an aversion to American puritanism as a repression of the amoral variety of human nature, even if his mode of expression enacts how puritanical disapproval heightens the lurid appeal of transgression. In Phillips’s work, the striving for complex tonalities feels less like an encyclopedic range of expression, as in Joyce or Dante, than a chamber-sized intimacy that reverberates outward from the anatomized selfhood, frank, urbane, disabused. That his heightened realism of feelings, including the image of the straddled wound, is also a form of ecstatic vision reads less like a contradiction than an expression of inherent contrarieties, which his work invites us to hold to the light, if only to discern the Wittgensteinian net of conceptual limits under which we are all confined.
In an interview in 2001, Phillips noted that “morality seems more flexible than we are often willing to suggest,” recalling lines in The Tether that suggest language should be as flexible as morality, “how there’s nothing, it / seems, not to be given / / in to …” If such a statement was still in the liberatory mode, one that pursued freedom of expression to counter years of moralistic suppression, and was not merely hyperbolic—I assume certain acts, like murder, were not actually “to be given in to”—In the Blood represented an invocation to both a vision of liberation and its limits. In our post-9/11, post-Covid culture, where sexual freedom, always frail, is now beset by other malignancies, like the recrudescence of fascism and imperialism and the threat that technologies pose to any culture that seeks to be more than notionally human, the moral questions that Phillips’s work faces are not the same as the ones he confronted at the start.
To re-publish a three-decade-old debut by a poet who has written over twenty volumes of poetry and prose is to affirm the oeuvre’s significance. Phillips’s work reads increasingly like that of another prolific poet with whom he otherwise has little in common, John Ashbery, whose poetry can be viewed as a grand transcription, a flow chart, of inner life. In recent books like To 2040 and Killing Spree, another chronicler of consciousness, Jorie Graham, has reinvented her style in a jaggedly demotic way that suggests a new engagement with mortality and the contemporary world, as has Henri Cole, in his transformations of diction and form and the intrusions of current news in The Other Love. Phillips’s previous collection, Scattered Snows, to the North (2024), shows an autumnal concern with mortality, too, and a newfound commitment to the baroque knotting of syntax that characterizes his mature style. The reissue of In the Blood suggests a beginning that is also an end, “before the visionary falling away / from a body left mumbling to itself.” For a poet who has continued to provide a profusion of gifts, the arrival of a world beyond imagining three decades ago may well augur a new set of moral costs that Phillips’s artistry will seduce his admirers into paying.
James Allen Hall (he/they) is the author of two books of poetry, and one book of lyric essays: Now You’re the Enemy, Romantic Comedy, and I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well. With the poet Aaron Smith, they cohost Breaking Form: A Poetry and Culture Podcast.
Cate Lycurgus’s work appears in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets 2025, Ploughshares, Orion, and elsewhere. Her debut collection Radiance, Despite received Four Way Books’ Levis Prize and is forthcoming in 2028. Cate lives in San Jose, California.
Derrick Austin is the author of three poetry collections: This Elegance; Tenderness, winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; and Trouble the Water. He lives in Chicago.
David Woo is the author of two books of poetry, Divine Fire and The Eclipses. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry London, Literary Hub, Georgia Review, and other journals and anthologies.