Pale Colors in a Tall Field
Poems
Farrar Straus & Giroux · Print & ebook · March 23, 2021
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets.
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- Who it’s for
- These poems turn memory and the body toward questions of selfhood, change, and resistance.
- Themes
- Memory and forgetting, Selfhood and multiplicity, Thought and body as resistance
- Genres
- LGBTQ+ Poetry, American Poetry, Love Poetry
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Start with this bookAbout this book
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.
Continue reading
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.
Memory in Shifting Colors
These poems turn memory and the body toward questions of selfhood, change, and resistance.
Come here for
- A kaleidoscopic view of the self
- Pale and vivid memories held in the same frame
Expect
- Thoughtful poems about remembering and forgetting
- Shifts in perspective as life shifts
Where it sits
| LGBTQ+ Poetry | 85% |
|---|---|
| American Poetry | 64% |
| Love Poetry | 40% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- African American Poetry
- LGBTQ+ Poetry
- Authors
- Carl Phillips
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- March 23, 2021
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Memory and forgetting · Selfhood and multiplicity · Thought and body as resistance
- Reading lane
- African American Poetry