Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 - Carl Phillips Audiobook

Written by Carl Phillips
Read by Carl Phillips
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

“In much of the best contemporary poetry, beauty of thought is at least as important as beauty of language. Carl Phillips, here reading his own Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, has an ample supply of both, but it is the thinking behind each poem that makes it possible for the language to have power.”—AudioFile

WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY

A new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips’s Then the War

I’m a song, changing. I’m a light

rain falling through a vast

darkness toward a different

darkness.

Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an “ongoing quest”; Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his listener. 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.

Then the War 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, Star Map with Action Figures.

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. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.

Length: 2 hrs and 59 mins
Release date: 06-21-23