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.