Living Weapon

Description

Living Weapon is a love song to the imagination, a new blade of light homing in on our political moment. A winged man plummets from the troposphere, four police officers enter a phone store, concrete pavements hang overhead. Phillips ruminates on violins and violence, on hatred and pleasure, on turning forty-three, even on the end of existence itself. His poetry reveals the limitations of our vocabulary, showing that our platitudes are inadequate to the brutal times we find ourselves in. And yet, through interrogation of allegory and symbol, names and things, time and musicality, a language of grace and urgency is found. For still our lives go on, and these are poems of survival as much as indictment. Living Weapon is a piercing, flaring collection from 'a virtuoso poetic voice' (Granta).

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of two books of poems (Heaven and The Ground) and two essay collections (The Circuit and When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness). As well as being a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, his awards include a Whiting Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing and the Nicolas Guillen Outstanding Book Award. Phillips lives in New York City and Barcelona.

'Throughout the collection, Rowan Ricardo Phillips refuses to abandon the past; instead, he interrogates its ghosts - in all their terrible admixture of violence and beauty - and, despite every reason not to, he sings.' - Will Brewbaker, Los Angeles Review of Books 'Phillips brilliantly uses poetry to probe contemporary life and all its tensions, and provide a clear-sighted respite from those tensions. Written by a master of form and tone, Living Weapon is essential reading.' - Nick Laird