Living Weapon: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780374539320)

Award-winning essayist and poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips presents a bracing renewal of civic poetry in Living Weapon.

. . . and we'd do this again
And again and again, without ever
Knowing we were the weapon ourselves,
Stronger than steel, story, and hydrogen.
-- from Even Homer Nods

A revelation, a shoring up, a transposition: Rowan Ricardo Phillips's Living Weapon is a love song to the imagination, a new blade of light honed in on our political moment. A winged man plummets from the troposphere; four NYPD officers enter a cellphone store; concrete sidewalks hang overhead. Here, in his third collection of poems, Phillips offers us ruminations on violins and violence, on hatred, on turning forty-three, even on the end of existence itself. Living Weapon reveals to us the limitations of our vocabulary, that our platitudes are not enough for the brutal times in which we find ourselves. But still, our lives go on, and these are poems of survival as much as they are an indictment. Couched in language both wry and ample, Living Weapon is a piercing addition from a "virtuoso poetic voice" (Granta).

Author: Rowan Ricardo Phillips
ISBN-10: 0374539324
ISBN-13: 9780374539320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Language: English
Published: 02/16/2021
Pages: 96
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.20lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.20w x 0.40d