Cur Aliquid Vidi

Lance Phillips

Continuing where his Corpus Socius (“companion body”) leaves off, Phillips pursues his poetic investigation into the life of the body human, from infancy through childbirth, aging, and death. Phillips's shattered and reconstructed syntax results in a minimalism that poet/critic Christine Hume notes “is rare and refreshing in a contemporary setting that insists on beating the Baroque horse unto prolix death... Here you will find a revivified lyric; as Hopkins did, Phillips leads poetry forward by taking it through the back door.”

“‘Why did I have to see something?’ translates the title to Lance Phillips’ extraordinary second collection, and if the question is Ovid's, it also remains any poet’s who follows the exilic logic of language. Revisioning myth, Cur aliquid vidi mines the eros in language and discovers how it must, ultimately, reach agape. What is the purpose of the exile's word to the community which excludes him? To be instructed by what is absent. Read and be instructed!” —Claudia Keelan

“The voice of this poem-sequence is embedded where the ‘dying’ naturally occurs. Erotic play abounds, its words-made-flesh conceived in guilt further troubled by their future estate within a polis where the mythic endgame of the family romance must play itself out.” —Timothy Liu

“You know how sex can overflow the room and pulsate the trees outside and the books you are reading through the brain in flashes and symmetries and metamorphoses? This book records a coupling gone infinite. As I read I could feel the light in the room and the words in it collapsing together and rearranging themselves. That’s intimacy. We should all have such sex and be so faithful.” —Catherine Wagner

“Lance Phillips’ poems are incandescent, strange in the best way (human), a ‘wild system’ where language’s physics accelerate into specific physicalities (rustling, flying), at once rarified and immediate, latinate and gloriously made-up.”—Lee Ann Brown

Lance Phillips is author of Corpus Socius. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife, son, and daughter. He writes and manages the weblogs Coursing Public Thought and Here Comes Everybody.

A sample poem from the book

from Gnomologium

Five hotter smaller nights

Cuffs passing through lip producing “he's dying”

five halters night

smaller halters night

Saying it effectively “chariot” touching near bed

Something (a liquid)

The clutch pear blossoms of it

Proud converting off his skin

reap rapping into the brass frame

Lif-ting lif-ting

He winked efforts

Props up his body good chair calling the name for it paradise

black good birds rise

. . .

“It talks to me mostly it hums” Anger

sure at the concern with position

in mind and extending into topos The deepest is the skin

Holding in hyacinth

wild system