In 1912, a young girl's murder rocked the rural community of Forsyth County, Georgia and led a mob of whites to lynch a black man on the town square. Later, bands of night-riders declared Forsyth "whites-only" and sent 1,100 citizens running for their lives, slowly erasing all evidence of their crime. Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale, spanning the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the promise of Reconstruction and the crushing injustice of Forsyth's racial cleansing. The story continues, including a violent attack on civil rights activists in 1987 as residents fought to "Keep Forsyth White", well into the 1990s. Patrick Phillips breaks the century-long silence of his hometown and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that shapes America in the twenty-first century.

In 1912, a young girl's murder rocked the rural community of Forsyth County, Georgia and led a mob of whites to lynch a black man on the town square. Later, bands of night-riders declared Forsyth "whites-only" and sent 1,100 citizens running for their lives, slowly erasing all evidence of their crime. Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale, spanning the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the promise of Reconstruction and the crushing injustice of Forsyth's racial cleansing. The story continues, including a violent attack on civil rights activists in 1987 as residents fought to "Keep Forsyth White", well into the 1990s. Patrick Phillips breaks the century-long silence of his hometown and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that shapes America in the twenty-first century.

This second collection, a follow-up to Patrick Phillips' award-winning debut, navigates the course of the male experience, and particularly young fatherhood. Like Virgil's Aeneas, the book's central figure is in the middle time of life, a grown man with an aging father on his shoulders and a young son at his hand. Phillips' plainspoken and moving lyrics add an important voice to the poetry of home as he struggles to reconcile fatherhood and boyhood, present and past, and the ache of loving what must be lost.'In sparse, deft, and elegant language, Phillips's remarkable second book of poems, ""Boy"", places the poet midway between the lives of his parents and the lives of his children, where 'the endless dream / of childhood' has given way to the reality that 'whole human beings / sprang from us.' From this vantage point, he celebrates the wonderful simultaneity of experience that allows him to be, all at once, father, son, and boy' - Michael Collier, author of ""Dark Wild Realm"".Patrick Phillips' first book, ""Chattahoochee"", was selected by Alice Quinn, Robert Wrigley, and Robert Pinsky for the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and also received a ""Discovery""/The Nation Prize from the Unterberg Poetry Center. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen, and his translations of the Danish poet Paul la Cour received the Sjoberg Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. He is currently an assistant professor of English at Drew University.