RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books[Phillips] is among our most prolific and widely and frequently published poets, and yet, reading his poems, I sense, too, their rareness ... His poems are cerebral but also sensuous. They are arguments with the self and the world — questions and reversals, attempts at definition and refinement — but they also feel skeptical of their own observations and conclusions. If their figurations are provisional and contingent, they are no less seductive ... I couldn’t mistake these poems for any other poet’s work. In a moment obsessed with snappy performances, Phillips’s poems are contemplative, rich, and troubled. They are rarely axiomatic or quotable. Often, their power lies in their unfolding ... The new poems, collected here for the first time under the title Then the War, show the poet deepening and extending the signature features of his artistry: his singular syntax, undulating and modulating over lines and stanzas, his restless sharpening and self-correction, his attention to the complexities of the desiring self. Phillips’s is a poetry of twists and turns, of subtle adjustments of meaning and specificity ... Carl Phillips interrogates sex, power, history, the way nature reflects and refuses our human desires. As usual, his new poems exploit the tensions between the force of music and the force of the sentence, the force of pleasure and the force of violence.
Jericho Brown
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksDrawing on the language of myths and flowers, Jericho Brown’s newest poems extol, dismantle, challenge, and enlarge the tradition ... The poems of The Tradition, Brown’s third collection, are at turns tender and vulnerable, severe and riveting ... The Tradition contains love poems and elegies, poems that bring into thrilling contact the tropes of \'traditional\' lyric — lilies, Greco-Roman landscapes, museum paintings — with an urgency borne of threat. Brown deploys \'traditional\' lyric form, too, to make his starkest and most memorable critiques ... Remarkably, Jericho Brown’s mythic retellings critique the assumptions behind them as well as the ways they justify historical and contemporary violence ... The collection’s very best poems even show the violent world pressing in on the private space of erotic lyric ... Brown handles his complicated and messy subjects with a strong sense of formal order and emotional restraint ... The Tradition revels in complexity and self-incrimination.
