Empty Clip

by Emilia Phillips

The poems of Empty Clip bore into the cultures of violence in the United States while candidly cross-firing upon the poets' complicity and testifying on these cultures' effects upon female body image and mental health.

From a meditation about a bullet hole-animated PowerPoint presentation on campus shooters to the startled invective against an unprovoked dick pic, lyrics brooding upon illness-driven suicidal thoughts to narratives about a slippery memory of childhood abuse, Emilia Phillips's third poetry collection sears with the "angry love" of self to find some truth that's nevertheless "a broken bone that can't be / set."

Genres: Poetry

60 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 23, 2018

About the author

Emilia Phillips is the author of a previous collection, Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013), and three chapbooks, most recently Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, 2015). She's received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry and lyric essays have appeared in Agni, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary College of New Jersey and the 32 Poems interviews editor.

Reviews

[L. A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! So many topics/themes are explored in these poems--including gun violence, death, eating disorders, suicide, so many others--that each poem was its own surprise. The strongest poems for me came in the first section, with the opener "This is how I came to know how to" to be a stunning entryway into the collection. "On a Late-Night Encounter with a Barefoot College Student Wearing Only a Party Dress and a Man's Blazer" is a poem that is going to stick with me for a long time.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75 stars

Wow, this collection really took me by surprise. I had already ordered this one when I read Phillips' chapbook Bestiary of Gall and was not particularly thrilled with the latter (frustratingly opaque and too conceptual), so I had lowered my expectations going into this full-length collection. But Empty Clip is much more cohesive and impactful. I was really impressed with Phillips' technique and already want to reread for a closer study. She packs so much detail into each poem without it ever feeling forced or imagistic for the sake of it. I felt very engaged as a reader and challenged in a good way, never frustrated. Just a great reading experience overall and exactly what I want out of a poetry collection.

Phillips deals with a lot of thorny subjects here, but it doesn't read like an Issues Book, if you know what I mean. There's a good variety across the poems without it starting to feel haphazard, though I do think the first section is by far the strongest. Some of the later poems deal with technology and its effect on human emotions & interactions. I loved these lines from "On Receipt of a Dick Pic":

I wish we could say / we are making ourselves eternal by making ourselves / forwardable, an afterlife in the cloud.

And finally, a shoutout for the wonderful cover design. Supremely clever!

So in the space of a week, I went from feeling pretty meh about this poet to wanting to check out more of her work immediately.

TW for sexual assault, gun violence, suicide ideation, eating disorders

This was book #9 for #TheSealeyChallenge (and yes, I am still several days behind).

[Cait Hutsell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh. I need to reread slowly. Not sure I “get” it all but it’s an excellent read. My head and heart are in pain after, in a good way.

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Searingly intelligent and affective work.

[deep]

PW: Phillips (Groundspeed) responds to violence with an unyielding sonic lyricism and filmic narrative images that are both highly personal and mediated. The poems reflect on American gun culture and related violence, as well as the poet’s personal intersections with these landscapes. In “Hollow Point,” a memory of a pet’s death frames an inhumane world by removing the border between human and animal: “the way the dog’s head opened/ like laughter/ into grief, the hollow points/ screaming skull and brain/ into the dining room wall.” These poems find some comfort in the inherent value of fellow humans, however uncomfortably close they may be. “We will never forgive one another/ for being human, which is a part of what makes us/ human,” Phillips writes in the hilarious “On Receipt of a Dick Pic.” Her poems approach difficult material with suitably deadpan humor and dazzle when disrupting institutional messaging, seen in such titles as “The CIA Live-Tweets the Assassination of Usama Bin Ladin Five Years Later” and “Campus Shooter Powerpoint and Information Session.” Phillips uses repetition and juxtaposition to press for further conversation on American gun violence and what it means to live through it: “because repetition// makes muscle// makes muscle/ memory// of violence// the dead make us// alive or so// we tell them.” (Apr.)