Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and this week I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Carl Phillips,

whose most recent book, The Tather, has been published by Farras Strauss and Giroux,

his previous works, Pastoral, which was nominated

for the LA Times Book Prize, comes from Grey Wolf as do from the devotions and

Cortege.

His first book was in the blood.

And I wanted, I guess, to go about this in a sort of roundabout way. The first

thing I saw when I started reading your poetry was a quote from Juna Barnes as Nightwood.

And that is the unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

I'm a great lover of Juna Barnes, and it seemed to me that what I found in the book

was an interest in a syntax like Juna Barnes'es that would wind and in a sense disappear,

that what is following very intently imagery and argument

through the rabbit hall into something beyond sense.

I suppose, I don't know if that comes from Juna Barnes,

but it is, it does seem to be something that's characteristic of the way I write.

And increasingly, someone was saying that the poems seem to hover over their own dissolution.

...