Reviews
"In sparse, deft, and elegant language, Phillips’s remarkable second book of poems, Boy, places the poet midway between the lives of his parents and the lives of his children, where 'the endless dream / of childhood' has given way to the reality that 'whole human beings / sprang from us.' From this vantage point, he celebrates the wonderful simultaneity of experience that allows him to be, all at once, father, son, man, and boy."
—Michael Collier, author of Dark Wild Realm
Description
This follow-up to Patrick Phillips’s award-winning debut navigates the course of the male experience, and particularly young fatherhood. Like Virgil’s Aeneas, the book’s central figure is in the middle time of life, a grown man with an aging father on his shoulders and a young son at his hand. Phillips’s plainspoken and moving lyrics add an important voice to the poetry of home as they struggle to reconcile fatherhood and boyhood, present and past, and the ache of loving what must be lost.