For this installment of our weekly book reviews from Booklist, the American Library Association’s nationally distributed book and media review publication, we have Diego Báez’s review of “In the Blood” by Carl Phillips, first published Februrary 3, 2026, at Booklist Online.
Enjoy.
“In the Blood”
By Carl Phillips. March 2026. 128p. Farrar, paper, $18 (9780374608866); e-book (9780374608873).
First published in 1992, this debut book by the now-celebrated Phillips (“Scattered Snows, to the North,” 2024) introduced the world to a writer of tender subtlety and lyrical contradictions that were “[u]niversal and private, lurid and hidden, transcendent and terrestrial,” as described by Rachel Hadas in her original Introduction. Philips’ early poems foretell the features that came to define the career of this Pulitzer–winning poet—a bracing vulnerability (“I have spent years tugging / between my legs, / and proved nothing”), indelible imagery (“A child’s gown / clings to the spokes of an abandoned wheel”), and a remarkable ability to coalesce Hellenistic, romantic, and modernist qualities into contemporary masterworks (as in “Still Life: Treadmill with Mirror,” which riffs on John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”). A new afterword by the author adds illuminating context. Phillips reflects on his nascent queer identity that emerged together with the book’s initial release; on early literary influences, including Lucie Brock-Broido and Brigit Pegeen Kelly; and on the uncanny alignment of his debut book with the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s. Truly worth a revisit for fans of Phillips and a must-read for those not yet converted.—Diego Báez
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