Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike

by Emilia Phillips

Poetry. "In her latest collection, the fiercely gifted Emilia Phillips offers a breviary of film noir kōans ('public cases') that interrogate, singly and collectively, what John Keats called the 'vale of soul-making.' Each key—or peep- hole—shaped lyric presents a riddle, a 'scene,' in and across which a fluid cast of characters (the vagrant, a child, the citizen, the lover, the diplomat, the mannequin, the archaeologist, the parade, the neighbors), including a host of animals (owl, snake, dog, cat, mice), appear and reappear in relation to recurring sites of possibility, most of them empty or dangerously inhabited—a metal chair, the crematory, a dairy, a heap of snow, a discarded tire, musical instruments, mouths, an abandoned house, a frozen pond. By playing with the discourse and tropes of clues, proofs, and evidence, Phillips remains true to the ineffability that haunts the crux of the body/soul mystery."—Lisa Russ Spaar

Genres: Poetry, 21st Century

37 pages, Paperback

First published May 23, 2015

About the author

Emilia Phillips is the author of a previous collection, Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013), and three chapbooks, most recently Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, 2015). She's received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry and lyric essays have appeared in Agni, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary College of New Jersey and the 32 Poems interviews editor.

Reviews

[Cait Hutsell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t fully...get this yet. But I want to go back, read again. It’s lovely.

[Leah Angstman]

I will review this book in my March 15 column of the Nerdy & Random Bookshelf. I will crosspost once the review is published.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well done but confused as to what it is supposed to be about. I think I know but I would feel silly if I said it out loud, it’s one of those.