Pagan Era

"Exquisitely wrought, wildly imaginative, Pagan Era is one of the most exciting new collections I've read in a long while. The poems are, at turns, playful and dangerously serious. And always, always, surprising. Sometimes, disturbingly so! Like 'a long match/stick next to a haystack next to a red gallon/ of quiet gasoline.' Lovers of Simic and Tate will find something to love here as well. Which is not to say that this work reads at all derivative. Rather, it honors a tradition by carrying it forward. And I'm here for it." — John Murillo

"'Some people feel their entire lives are dust.'Throughout Philip Schaefer's lyrical and buoyant Pagan Era, we encounter poems that use vivid description to trace an inner struggle—one that resists the binding pressures of masculinist culture even as it immerses itself in its layers. The speaker works to fashion a kind of emotional armor against forces that would numb him, yet he cannot fully deny the truths of his circumstances. Instead, he constructs a personal sublime—a language of symbols that helps him navigate the compromises of the soul.Rather than rejecting these 'lives of dust,' he leans into them: 'Today I'll find a church and consider how many prayer licks it takes to get to the middle of a soul. I will dress like a baby giraffe.' In such moments, the images surface and begin to cohere into a tonal blend of humor and harmony. Within these softer, more vulnerable registers, a fuller sense of living becomes possible, and we see the beauty Schaefer brings to both turmoil and glee with an almost effortless grace." — Prageeta Sharma

"'Ambulance sirens mow the lawn of my mind late at night.' First, wow. Second, I offer this as warning and enticement: Philip Schaefer's imagination is immense, surprising, and honest, which means the poems here range from brutal to kind. 'I break everything I cannot ignite' suggests he's looking for the divine or some equivalent, and only that which burns or glows deserves to survive. This is a spiritual test or calling, one that requires the poet to 'collect/the invisible hours, the sleepless/shadows, the everything everyone else/forgets.' After reading this book, I believe you'll agree with a line from Pagan Era that speaks deeply to the nature of Schaefer's work and poetry itself: 'And this is how we lucid dream.'" — Bob Hicok

"Reading Pagan Era feels like inhabiting the consciousness of dreams. Philip Schaefer's paratactic poems stack startling images and strange logics with sure-footed cadences, creating a stable freneticism that grapples, vividly, with the bizarre yet mundane senselessness that permeates so much of modern life. With its agitated proximities of violence and whimsy, this marvelous, unsettling book is in touch with wonder: wild and steadfast at once." — Gabrielle Bates

Philip Schaefer's debut collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. Individual poems have won publication contests by The Puritan, Meridian, and Passages North. His work has been featured on Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in The Poetry Society of America. He runs a modern Mexican restaurant called The Camino in Missoula, MT.