Comments about Louis Phillips’ work:
His fiction:
There are a lot of wonderful surprises in Phillips’s stories – he is definitely his own man. All of the stories are unusual and arresting. – Rick DeMarinis on A Dream of Countries Where No one Dare Live
Phillips is a wonderfully imaginative and original writer. I don’t know anybody who can handle a variety of voices, as well as an astonishing variety of times and places, with the ease and skill he repeatedly demonstrates. Add to these things his trademark of the nearly original ‘idea’ for a story, the way a tale is suddenly moved into the supernatural or the surprising, off-the-wall development, a kind of personal poetry, and you have somebody whose work is typically very special and, at its finest, genuinely extraordinary. – George Garrett on A Dream of Countries Where No one Dare Live
Fiercely original in plot, action, and conception, many of these stories are very postmodern and very good. Phillips is skilled at verbal ingenuity, incorporating elements of ‘magic realism,’ disruption of predictable plots, elements of parody, play, and, in the best of his stories, profundity. – Don Graham on A Dream of Countries Where No one Dare Live
His poetry:
Louis Phillips’ poems, so deftly variable in mood and mode, have given this reader permanent pleasure. – James Merrill
Phillips looms as one of the most hugely inventive new poets going, in or out of meter and rime. – X.J. Kennedy
I like the absolutely straightforward way you go after a poem, whether you catch one or not. I like the fact that you recognize the obligation of the poet to make an attractive object. These are deceptive poems – people who haven’t sweated out this kind of lucidity are apt to think: I could do that. But in fact6 it takes a lot of luck and honesty and nerve, all of which you seem to have. Your poems enjoy good health. – William Meredith
His drama:
Here is a piece of theater you absolutely must not miss . .
. . This fine, touching, inventive, and gorgeously zany play is about . . . you
guess it – the failure of the American dream. – Jonathan Saville, Weekly
Reader (
It is strong and clever in its methodical pursuit of
madness. It is studded with non-sequiturs, puns, riddles, and sight-gags,
running wild or worked into routines and shticks. – Charlie Farber,
The play is framed in an exciting, almost frenetic mixture
of wild imagery and stark reality. . . . It is a nonstop bombardment of the
senses and the mind. - Bill Hagen, The San Diego Evening Tribune on The Last of
the Marx Brothers’ Writers
It is a naturalistic play, whose setting and details of
character and dialogue could not be more specific and lifelike. Yet the variety
of moods and feelings working their way out is such as to give it a glittering
intensity that passes realism. It is astonishingly textured...
- Richard Eder, The New York Times, on The
Ballroom in St. Patrick’s Cathedral