In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named; love at once restless, reckless, and yet desired for its potential to bring stability. In the process, he pitches estrangement against communion, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past's capacity both to teach and to mislead us; also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love's fallout. How to say no to despair.