Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, translator, and journalist. His writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other national and international publications. more…
A revelation, a shoring up, a transposition: 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 NYPD officers enter a cell phone store; concrete sidewalks hang overhead. more…
“Look closely and you can see major moments in US history informing his three collections. The Ground (2012) fell under in the shadow of 9/11; Heaven (2015) under the presidency of Barack Obama; and now the final part of this informal trinity, Living Weapon (2020) comes in the age of Donald Trump and COVID-19.
But though each collection can be read in context of specific eras, it is the idea of history itself—or at least an ossified sense of time and progress—that falls under siege in the latest book. Living Weapon asks us to resist the past, to imagine a different world. And key to this is the dream-will of the individual.”
—Andre Bagoo, The Rumpus
