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Star Map with Action Figures
"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."
34 pages, Paperback
First published September 17, 2019
1 person is currently reading
34 people want to read
About the author
Carl Phillips
86 books200 followersCarl Phillips is the highly acclaimed author of 10 collections of poetry.
He was born in 1959 to an Air Force family, who moved regularly throughout his childhood, until finally settling in his high-school years at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Boston University and taught high-school Latin for eight years.
His first book, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was heralded as the work of an outstanding newcomer in the field of contemporary poetry. His other books are Cortège (1995), a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; From the Devotions (1998), a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; The Tether, (2001), winner of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Rock Harbor (2002); The Rest of Love: Poems, a 2004 National Book Award finalist, for which Phillips also won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry; Riding Westward (2006); Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 (2007); and Speak Low (2009), a 2009 National Book Award finalist. Two additional titles were published in the 2003-04 academic year: a translation of Sophocles' Philoctetes came out in September 2003, and a book of essays, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, was published in May 2004. Phillips is the recipient of, among others, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Foundation Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, as well as in anthologies, including eight times in the Best American Poetry series, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, and The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poets. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. He is a Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.
He was born in 1959 to an Air Force family, who moved regularly throughout his childhood, until finally settling in his high-school years at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Boston University and taught high-school Latin for eight years.
His first book, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was heralded as the work of an outstanding newcomer in the field of contemporary poetry. His other books are Cortège (1995), a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; From the Devotions (1998), a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; The Tether, (2001), winner of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Rock Harbor (2002); The Rest of Love: Poems, a 2004 National Book Award finalist, for which Phillips also won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry; Riding Westward (2006); Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 (2007); and Speak Low (2009), a 2009 National Book Award finalist. Two additional titles were published in the 2003-04 academic year: a translation of Sophocles' Philoctetes came out in September 2003, and a book of essays, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, was published in May 2004. Phillips is the recipient of, among others, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Foundation Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, as well as in anthologies, including eight times in the Best American Poetry series, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, and The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poets. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. He is a Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 8, 2020
review forthcoming
March 21, 2021
Imaginary landscapes coalescing from the fog, memory and relationships as specters, the constellations as illegible celestial map — the layering of big ideas in Phillips’ chapbook is impressive. I’m not an experienced reader of chapbooks, so it took me a bit to get fully sync’d up with this one, but it was a rewarding journey.
The aforementioned landscapes are oriented around landmarks, which give us some of my favorite poems from the collection: the cathedral, the willow tree, the ocean, the forest at the center of sorrow. Others follow fleeting encounters between the specters that inhabit (sparsely) these winding paths. And because of the way the figures come and go, and the landscapes melt together, the whole thing has a bleary dreamlike quality.
Phillips’ distinctive flow reinforces the quality of being lost among ephemera. His lines continuously digress, moving away from their origins, and it starts to feel like you’re discovering what you’re looking for as you’re finding it. This demands re-reading at times, and it requires presence of mind to follow the imagery along its unraveling path.
It was a transportive experience, and did something I think I appreciate about this format: it gave me a sense that this is a unified project, a single complex idea developed according to its own necessity. My favorites were “And If I Fall,” “And Swept All the Visible Signs Away,” and “Single Frame of Winter.” Kudos. Thank you Mr Phillips and Sibling Rivalry.
The aforementioned landscapes are oriented around landmarks, which give us some of my favorite poems from the collection: the cathedral, the willow tree, the ocean, the forest at the center of sorrow. Others follow fleeting encounters between the specters that inhabit (sparsely) these winding paths. And because of the way the figures come and go, and the landscapes melt together, the whole thing has a bleary dreamlike quality.
Phillips’ distinctive flow reinforces the quality of being lost among ephemera. His lines continuously digress, moving away from their origins, and it starts to feel like you’re discovering what you’re looking for as you’re finding it. This demands re-reading at times, and it requires presence of mind to follow the imagery along its unraveling path.
It was a transportive experience, and did something I think I appreciate about this format: it gave me a sense that this is a unified project, a single complex idea developed according to its own necessity. My favorites were “And If I Fall,” “And Swept All the Visible Signs Away,” and “Single Frame of Winter.” Kudos. Thank you Mr Phillips and Sibling Rivalry.
August 14, 2020
“Beneath / the brocaded cloak, each bead stitched to it by hand, / beneath the cloak of some more breathable, lighter fabric / beneath that, the king’s cock rests like tenderness itself / against the kings left thigh. How soft the stars look.”
August 1, 2020
"Tell me what enters.
Speak of what's forever getting left behind."
A very special chapbook that fixates on the mutable nature of desire, of nature, of anger.
Speak of what's forever getting left behind."
A very special chapbook that fixates on the mutable nature of desire, of nature, of anger.
September 22, 2020
Of ends, it seems, of melancholy and lost hopes that by now are so weathered as to have lost the charge of "hope" but are no less lovely for being worn and behind one.
December 21, 2020
Not going to lie. I bought this book because of a comma in the first poem "And If I Fall." And I am glad I did. And I am glad, I did.
April 2, 2021
Carl Phillips destroys me.
“...In the song
of you, in the song I make of you,
in which your horselessness means
a fear of horses, nothing
more than that...”
“...In the song
of you, in the song I make of you,
in which your horselessness means
a fear of horses, nothing
more than that...”
September 8, 2023
What are dreams but the only rivers memory knows how to make?
-Carl Philips
-Carl Philips
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews