Living Weapon

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION

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 police officers enter a phone store, concrete pavements hang overhead. Phillips ruminates on violins and violence, on hatred and pleasure, on turning forty-three, even on the end of existence itself. His poetry reveals the limitations of our vocabulary, showing that our platitudes are inadequate to the brutal times we find ourselves in. And yet, through interrogation of allegory and symbol, names and things, time and musicality, a language of grace and urgency is found. For still our lives go on, and these are poems of survival as much as indictment. Living Weapon is a piercing, flaring collection from 'a virtuoso poetic voice' ( Granta ).

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published February 18, 2020

About the author

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of Heaven (2015) and The Ground( 2012). He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Robin Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Halo, Spiegel im Spiegel, Night of the Election, Trinidadian Triptych, Even Homer Nods, Love Song, Dark Matter Ode.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection. It is book-ended with essays, strange in how they match and don't match up; it is full of allusions, in deep conversation with the past, both literary and political. It is sonically rich. I feel like I should have stronger feelings about it, more to say, but I don't, though I'm sure there's a review out there that can give you more thoughts on this smart book.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Because experience is translation // Of an event we were all a part of: / When the young, lonely god took the gloves off, / Shattered the black mirror, and called it love.” In his latest collection of poetry, Living Weapon, Rowan Ricardo Phillips is grappling with nothing less than our fraught existence — with language and its insufficiency, the way that images and meaning are so prone to crumbling; and with the increasingly onerous living conditions of modern society, particularly for those othered by systemic prejudices. Take, for instance, the shortest and most brutally affecting poem in the collection, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, whose two lines, with so much context and implication packed in, deliver a stunning holy-fuck moment, its title riffing on TS Eliot, its first line on William Blake, its sharp tonal turn indicative of what it means to move in a city, inhabiting a Black body. Such poems as ‘Violins’ and ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ are also overtly political, in ways that overlap as much as they diverge, and poems like ‘The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet’ highlight a lyricism of great distinction; this is a poet whose eye for the “soft froth of lamplight and scrubbed-out stars” is somehow not jarring alongside his “song and pain”, a frustration that “platitudes / Like these are full of shit. Time is not time. / This moment sucks. Trust is not trust”, knowing “poetry continues as it is / Because because because because because because because.”

[John Oswald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes it’s obvious when you don’t read poetry very often. It did take me three complete goes at this collection before the meanings and visions started to come together. It was worth the effort - there are brilliant flights of imagination over the New York skyline; the menace of policemen in ‘civilian’ settings, the dislocation of city life, and all bookended by a grandmother’s death from Covid-19 and George Floyd. Which makes the collection a really powerful bit of what you might call civic poetry. Some need to be read aloud. Some evoke a city (Barcelona) in a way that lets you in to its secrets. ‘Living fucking weapon’. That’s how poetry can transmit an Idea and mental images that stick with us. Loved this. Perhaps poetry only reveals itself once we’ve stopped reading and start thinking.

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this collection of poems! I’m still new to reading poetry so I’m not sure how to review a full collection, or how to say exactly what I liked about it other than the language felt really vibrant and alive. Even when I was confused as hell, I was along for the ride. The vignettes interspersed throughout are so lovely too. Having been to Barcelona a few times, I appreciated his colouring of it. Really, it felt like I had become the witness to a long painting of the city unwinding itself before me.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems really depicted the personality of the author (I don’t know him, but it felt so unique!). The images were very evocative and opened my eyes to seeing the world new. I liked them very much.

[Rémi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Le premier et le dernier poème en prose sont les meilleurs. Il y a des vers frappants ici et là entre les deux.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Eventually, I needed to either give in to gravity and come down, of let my momentum continue to pull me up into the freezing burn and the blinding white drift of the stratosphere, rising without end until I eventually drowned in space."

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

1776; The First Last Light in the Sky; Mortality Ode; Spiegel im Spiegel; Love Song

[Charlotte Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

*2.5