Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including her most recent, Come-Hither Honeycomb. Belieu literary activism earned her the AWP's George Garrett Prize for her service to the national writing community, and she co-founded VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and Writers Resist. Belieu teaches in the University of Houston MFA/Ph.D. Creative Writing Program and for Lesley University's low residency MFA program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Carl Phillips is a seasoned poet, author, and translator who has published three prose books and sixteen poetry collections, most recently Then the War: New And Selected Poems 2007-2020His honors include the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (2023), a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis with a focus on contemporary poetry, classical philology, and translation.
Praise for Erin Belieu These poems continuously examine life, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with wry humor, as the poet offers an intelligent take on being a woman in the 21st century. -Library Journal, starred review In the world of [Belieu's] poems, no one is innocent; everyone is confined to the complexity, absurdity, and, above all, fallibility of their human condition -Publishers Weekly, starred review [Belieu's] gifts-for clarity, consolidation, humor and moments of hard-earned feeling-are old-fashioned ones. She's a comedian of the human spirit, in league with poets from Frank O'Hara through Deborah Garrison and Tony Hoagland. -Dwight Garner, The New York Times [Belieu's] latest collection toggles between lighthearted comedy and deep-seated loss, using paradox as a prerequisite for beauty... For every joke in Come-Hither Honeycomb, there's something tragic on the other side of the scale. -The New Yorker Praise for Carl Phillips I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences and it is not primarily a prose writer: the American poet Carl Phillips. -Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker Carl Phillips is a poet of enchantment and persuasion . . . I couldn't mistake these poems for any other poet's work. In a moment obsessed with snappy performances, Phillips's poems are contemplative, rich, and troubled. They are rarely axiomatic or quotable. Often, their power lies in their unfolding. -Los Angeles Review of Books With the incomparably gorgeous, deftly poetic sentences that make up his work, Carl Phillips has been exploring intimacy, sexuality, and interiority for more than a decade. -Literary Hub Almost no one, to my ear, charts the perpetually shifting moods and meanings of the interior psychic landscape as sensitively, or as beautifully, as he does. -The Washington Post