Scattered Snows, to the North: Poems in Bloomington, MN

An arresting study of memory, perception, and the human condition, from the Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips.
Carl Phillips’s
Scattered Snows, to the North
is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that’s based on human memory. If the poet’s last few books have concerned themselves with power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the usefulness of embracing it and of releasing ourselves from the need to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it happen? If we believe it didn’t, does that make our belief true?
In
, Phillips looks though the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition—“Tears / were tears,” mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn’t, the way people live until they don’t. And there was also joy. And beauty. “
Yet the world’s still
/
so beautiful
. . .
Sometimes
//
it is
. . .” And it was enough. And it still can be.