"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