Carl Phillips

"How does a sentence, // just like that, become prayer?" Part parable, part bestiary, part glossary of possible and impossible loves, Star Map with Action Figures, poem after poem, provides an answer. From the space between punishment and its promise, Phillips quizzes the thousand churlish faces of desire: two boys making love on a riverbank, a horse named Nightmare, the self "a needle pushed through / the stretched canvas of belief." Star Map with Action Figures counters the body's certainty with febrile syntax, challenging the mirror's ability to capture and the lover's willingness to stay. From the "forest that stands at the exact center of sorrow" to the cathedral in the speaker's mind, Star Map with Action Figures charts the severe and glittering histories of intimacy in flux. A king, a willow, a captain, the sea--all themselves, more, less, unsayable and not--become kinds of heroes, shattering the myth of "a limit to what any story could hold onto."

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