From the Stacks is a regular series on the Poetry Center Blog in which we solicit authors to wander our library and choose books that have been important to them and/or that they recommend.
Carl Phillips is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), and Reconnaissance (FSG, 2015), winner of the PEN USA Award and the Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of two books of prose: The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004), and he is the translator of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Oxford, 2004). A four-time finalist for the National Book Award, his honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Carl's selections From the Stacks are:
The Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand
The Animal Too Big To Kill by Shane McCrae
slow joy by Stephanie Marlis
The Fatalist by Lyn Hejinian
Ex-Voto by Adélia Prado
Navigable Waterways by Pamela Alexander
Penelope by Sue Goyette
Hemming the Water by Yona Harvey
Too Bright To See by Linda Gregg
Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal