A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most critically acclaimed poets.Carl Phillips's new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self's multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips's most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.

The Last of FanfareOn Being Asked to Be More Specific When It Comes to LongingPale Colors in a Tall FieldBlue Wash on Linen Canvas, Believed UnfinishedTo All AppearancesTugging the Arrow OutInstructions PriorFor Nothing Tender about ItDirt Being DirtSnowA Little Closer Though, If You Can, for What Got Lost HereSince When Shall Speak of It No MoreThe Same in Sun as It Felt in ShadowAs Easy to Cry as Not ToWherefore Less LonelySo the Edge of the WorldBlow It BackWhat They Did, Who They Did It WithSkylarkMorphineBarbarianEven If Sleep and Death Are BrothersYet No Less GratefulIs It True All Legends Once Were RumorsSaid the Horse to the LightThe Steeper the FallNow That Nature Includes OblivionOverheard, Under a Dark EnchantmentGhost ChoirIf It Must Be WinterCadenceTo Be Worn Openly at the Wrist, or at the Chest and HiddenOn Mistaking the Sound of Spurs for Bells ApproachingDefiancenotesacknowledgments