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Overview
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award
Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize
Long-listed for the National Book Award
Long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award
One of The Washington Post’s Best Poetry Collections of 2015
One of NPR’s Best Books of 2015
One of Flavorwire’s Best Poetry Books of 2015
"Who the hell's heaven is this?" Rowan Ricardo Phillips offers many answers, and none at all, in Heaven, the piercing and revelatory encore to his award-winning debut, The Ground. Swerving elegantly from humor to heartbreak, from Colorado to Florida, from Dante's Paradise to Homer's Iliad, from knowledge to ignorance to awe, Phillips turns his gaze upward and outward, probing and upending notions of the beyond.
"Feeling, real feeling / with all its faulty / Architecture, is / Beyond a god's touch"but it does not elude Phillips. Meditating on feverish boyhood, on two paintings by Chuck Close, on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, on a dead rooster by the side of the road in Ohio, on an elk grazing outside his window, his language remains eternally intoxicating, full of play, pathos, and surprise.
"The end," he writes, "like / All I've ever told you, is uncertain." Or, elsewhere: "The only way then to know a truth / Is to squint in its direction and poke." Phillipswho received a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award as well as the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Awardmay not be certain, but as he squints and pokes in the direction of truth, his power of perception and elegance of expression create a place where beauty and truth come together and drift apart like a planet orbiting its star. The result is a book whose lush and wounding beauty will leave its mark on readers long after they've turned the last page.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780374536220 |
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Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 80 |
Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is also the author of The Ground (FSG, 2012). He is the recipient of a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
The Mind After Everything Has Happened 3
Kingdom Come 4
The Odyssey, Book 11, Lines 538-556 5
Little Song 8
Boys 9
The Starry Night 12
The Empyrean 13
The Barycenter 15
Measure For Measure 16
Nothing Of A Blue Remains 18
Mirror For The Mirror 20
Monday Morning In Snowmass, Colorado 21
Paradiso, V: 91-93 22
Sin Verguenza 23
Lucas and Mark 25
The Beatitudes Of Malibu 26
Like Someone Who Sees Himself Close To Death 30
Nature 31
Apollo And Marsyas 32
The God And The Goat 34
Musica Universalis 35
Grand Poème Pathétique 36
Paris Prelude 37
To An Old Friend In Paris 38
Never Again Would Birds' Song Be The Same 39
Like A Bullet Shot Backwards Through Time 41
The Primum Mobile 42
Pax Americana 43
On The End Of The Iliad 44
News From The Muse Of Not Guilty 46
The Once And Future King Of Ohio 47
Mirror For The Mirror 49
The Menace 50
The Descent Of Jupiter Over The Maroon Bells 51
Exit Troubadour 54
Bernardo 55
An Excuse For Mayhem 57
Vall De Núria 58
Acknowledgments 61