October 31, 2013
Carl Phillips and the Post-Epic: Thoughts on Double Shadow
If someone asked me to guess what it might be like to read the translated papyri of a failed, pre-modern dystopia, I’d tell them to read Carl Phillips’s Double Shadow. […]
October 31, 2013
The Stars Did What They Do: “Heaven and Earth,” Considered
“Heaven and Earth,” the penultimate poem in Carl Phillips’ Double Shadow, offers up vertigo, suffering, and fear—and all in the first four lines. The poem’s title, perhaps, alludes to the […]
October 29, 2013
The Sea Sings: More Questions for Carl Phillips’s “Almost Tenderly”
In the poem “Almost Tenderly,” from Double Shadow and also Kenyon’s Radiance Versus Ordinary Light: Selected Poems by Carl Phillips, “a man, stripped, beaten” is on the shore, the sea […]
October 17, 2013
In “Almost Tenderly,” Imagining the “It”
In the Carl Phillips poem “Almost Tenderly,” included in his Double Shadow and also Kenyon’s Radiance Versus Ordinary Light: Selected Poems by Carl Phillips, a scene unfolds inside an “It.” […]