Living Weapon Poems
Living Weapon Poems by Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a collection published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 16, 2021. This edition contains 96 pages and is presented in English. In this work, Phillips offers a renewal of civic poetry, exploring themes of imagination and the complexities of contemporary life through a series of poignant reflections.
Readers will encounter a range of subjects, including the interplay of violence and creativity, personal milestones, and the challenges of expression in difficult times. Phillips’s poems delve into the nuances of survival and critique the limitations of language in addressing the harsh realities of existence. With a blend of sharp imagery and thoughtful commentary, Living Weapon serves as a significant contribution to American poetry, particularly within the African American and Black literary traditions.
Official synopsis Publisher
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).
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