Carl Phillips offers a meditation on the place of devotion at the end of a century marked increasingly by failure and uncertainty. Challenging divinity (from Eros to Christ) and mining tradition (from ancient Greece to Donne), Phillips takes us even further into that dangerous space he has already made his own, where body and soul -- ever restless -- come explosively together. The New Yorker said of Phillips's book Cortege, "To desire is not to have: this apparent truism pervades Phillips's poems, where the erotic is always lined with sadness.... The verse here is both poised and informal, literate and personal".