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Reckon
What’s it like to have been born in Tombstone, Arizona?
In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.”
As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios.
With an original, searing voice, Reckon is an essential answer to the tough questions of past and future, inheritance and reinvention, all from the perspective of a boy stuck in the middle.
In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.”
As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios.
With an original, searing voice, Reckon is an essential answer to the tough questions of past and future, inheritance and reinvention, all from the perspective of a boy stuck in the middle.
170 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 10, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 28, 2026
Reckon blew me away, like the gunfights-gunfights-gunfights in “The Town Too Tough to Die.” In this poetic memoir, Logan Phillips returns to the dusty boardwalks of Tombstone where he was born, exploring toxic masculinity of gunslingers, soldiers, and the border industrial complex.
They’re all related, of course.
Reckon is a gritty reckoning between reality and the myth of the gunslinging West. I loved it!
They’re all related, of course.
Reckon is a gritty reckoning between reality and the myth of the gunslinging West. I loved it!
April 21, 2026
Logan Phillips, aka DJ Dirty Verbs, is Tucson's current poet laureate. The library had oodles of audiobooks to lend, so I borrowed one. First 20 minutes did not impress me, as I came to understand the memoir in poetry is graphic and visual and I was missing something in the listening.
But in the listening the truth and reckoning of the author's own voice and I'm so glad I witnessed it. I'll listen to it again, so close to home it hit, though he and I are nothing alike yet when you identify with the desert of Southern Arizona you easily spot your fellow.
Tombstone, the town; Tombstone, the movie; imagery I can conjure my own self echoed in Logan's remembrance. Children of the 70s and 80s are wired differently. We resonate on the same frequency, and I felt that while listening. I laughed out loud, I came to tears, I feel like I totally got it.
Had I known of this before the Tucson Festival of Books I would have braved the crowds to see him speak.
But in the listening the truth and reckoning of the author's own voice and I'm so glad I witnessed it. I'll listen to it again, so close to home it hit, though he and I are nothing alike yet when you identify with the desert of Southern Arizona you easily spot your fellow.
Tombstone, the town; Tombstone, the movie; imagery I can conjure my own self echoed in Logan's remembrance. Children of the 70s and 80s are wired differently. We resonate on the same frequency, and I felt that while listening. I laughed out loud, I came to tears, I feel like I totally got it.
Had I known of this before the Tucson Festival of Books I would have braved the crowds to see him speak.
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March 13, 2026Reinvents what a book can be (and I’ll never get over how brilliant the title is)
March 23, 2026
A wonderful book/work of art about masculinity, cowboys, queerness, history, parenthood, as tied to the author's experience being born in Tombstone.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews