Sir

A new book of poems from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips.

What does that word mean? “Sir” is an honorific, a word that indicates the superiority of its recipient, the subordination of its speaker. It might be slightly antiquated, too, a small linguistic lingerer from another time, another world.

Carl Phillips’s Sir finds the poet in a new mode once again. It is a collection of poems about power and submission—on the level of personal, intimate relationships with others and ourselves, and on the level of our relationships with authority figures or gods. As always in Phillips’s work, there is a curiosity about how emotion rests in language itself, and about how words both structure emotion and estrange us from it. “Sometimes I call a thing true / because I want it to be true,” says the poet, who later admits, “I made that up; / what of it?”