Poetry. "The fragmentary words and phrases strung together in Phillips's new collection stretch the boundaries of minimalist form in a way that resembles the poetics of the Language school. Isolated lines such as 'Your interpretation of friendship. / But no one waited' or 'Take a close look at power structures, / integrate them into your life' are presented without any obvious context. After reading a few pages, one may see the bits and pieces begin to suggest a common theme: the attempt to locate the self that is lost in American mass culture. Phillips plays with language, tossing in foreign words, juxtaposing words with similar sounds and meanings. As he repeats or varies phrases, associations build. Phillips endows the mundane with new importance in lines like: 'I mean, who had cut her hair?' The tension mounts within this abstract landscape, catching readers unaware. Suddenly it appears that a child has been hit by a car, the police have been called, the speaker is no longer in a city by the ocean, but shipwrecked on an island. Were their form more conventional, these poems would seem didactic; Phillips instead presents a compelling, if difficult, text."
—Publishers Weekly

Author City: PASADENA, CA USA

Born in Los Angeles in 1951, Dennis Phiilps is the author of ten books of poetry and one novel, HOPE (2007). Former director of the Beyond Baroque Literary Center, Venice, from 1983-1986, Phillips was the book review editor for Sulfur magazine, as well as poetry editor of the LA Weekly. Phillips is a professor in the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Art Center College of Design and teaches regularly in the Graduate Writing program at Otis College of Art and Design.

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