Praise for Reconnaissance

"Carl Phillips creates smooth currents of language that begin in one place, subtly shift direction and then shift again . . . The sounds and rhythms of these poems are gorgeous, and Phillips, whose awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, isn't afraid to ask unsettling questions." --Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post

"A characteristically bold and beautiful collection from this brilliant lyricist." --Booklist

"Phillips, who has always wrestled gracefully with human longing, confronted solitude in his most recent collection, Silverchest, an LJ Best Poetry Book. Now he confronts a world that's constantly redefining itself, faster and faster, a world where the truth can't be neatly pinned. Never mind that 'There's a trembling inside the both of us, there's a trembling, inside us both, ' these are still finally poems alight with hope." --Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Praise for Carl Phillips

"I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences, and he is not primarily a prose writer: the American poet Carl Phillips . . . Like Emily Dickinson, Phillips is always taking in the minute metamorphoses of his surroundings (Dickinson's 'Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons') as a way of measuring his own 'internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are.' . . . But he is not a loner; he is, instead, a poet of erotic life as scored for solo contemplation." --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker