The World’s Description: New and Selected Poems

Phillip Foss’s The World’s Description: New and Selected Poems is a carefully culled selection from an astonishing body of work that reaches back over thirty years. Rather than present a chronological retrospective, Foss creates an original work by bringing poems together that speak with each other outside of their original context. This arrangement throws a new and distinctive light on a remarkable poetic intelligence. As Gustaf Sobin wrote, “The light of Phillip Foss’s poems comes from a considerable distance. It doesn’t speak. Not until it reaches the poet, and refracts in the process, does it break into sound, into the dye and tough fiber of Foss’s relentlessly speculative voice. These are marvelous poems. They bear within them both the silence of their origins and the delicate fracture of their execution. Phillip Foss is among the rare poets today whose work, rather than merely recycling so much exhausted material, actually comes to inform and invigorate language itself.”