. . . 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).
- ISBN10 0374191999
- ISBN13 9780374191993
- Publish Date 18 February 2020
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 29 April 2023
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 96
- Language English