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Carl Phillips is the author of seventeen books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North, and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the Pulitzer Prize. His other honours include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. His collection, Silverchest, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2014. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently, My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing, and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles. He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.

Photo credit: Reston Allen

Scattered Snows, to the North 2025 Shortlist

Judges’ Citation

Phillips has found a way to articulate love in all its assertions and disguises—calibrated in all its doubt, tenderness, forms of desire, loyalty, solitudes.

It is Carl Phillips’ mastery that these poems measure, weigh, question, prevaricate: “it seemed,” “maybe,” “what if,” “it’s hard, these days, to know for sure what’s true,” “We weren’t afraid. Nor / unafraid.” And it is Phillips’ magic that this diction renders greater precision, not less; an astonishing accuracy in naming the liminal space from which our comprehension, acceptance, farewells, memories emerge and submerge again. Phillips has found a way to articulate love in all its assertions and disguises—calibrated in all its doubt, tenderness, forms of desire, loyalty, solitudes. In the poem “Stop Shaking,” he writes: “I keep making the same avoidable / few mistakes that I’ve always made, and then regretting them, / and then regretting them less.” In tone and diction, these poems never stray across the line between honesty and privacy. How grateful the reader is to enter and re-enter these poems, to be entered by them. For in their articulation of what is most elusive—what we cannot understand and also somehow know—in their recognition of unanswerable human limitation, is a kind of forgiveness.

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Judges’ Citation

Carl Phillips is a poet of the line and a poet of the sentence, both at once.

Carl Phillips is a poet of the line and a poet of the sentence, both at once. Rubbing these two intangible structures – one musical, the other linguistic – against one another is an ancient way of kindling verbal and intellectual fire, and Phillips does it in poem after poem with casual mastery. The lines are carved in low relief, shaped by internal assonance, not by end-rhyme, while the sentences trace a perfectly grammatical yet occasionally dizzying switchback trail, using the standard resources of prose to climb far beyond the prosaic domain. Phillips’s Silverchest consists in large part of reflections on a love affair gone bad. It is a gay male love affair in this case, but the anguish, the self-doubt, the sense of abandonment and loss, are captured here with a tenderness, depth, and precision that can dance through sociocultural fences as easily as deer can dance across the grass. Silverchest speaks, as great books do, out of its own profound particularity, to and for something wordless and shared by us all.



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