Living Weapon: Poems (First Edition)

Phillips, Rowan Ricardo

ISBN 10: 0374191999 / ISBN 13: 9780374191993

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2020

About this Item

FSG, New York, 2020. First edition. First printing (with full number line, including 1). Hardbound. Fine in a fine jacket, with remainder mark upper edge. A clean tight unread copy. Price intact on front jacket flap ($24). Comes with archival-quality dust jacket cover.

Seller Inventory # Rear-Poetry-2022-12

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Living Weapon: Poems (First Edition)
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374191999
• ISBN 13: 9780374191993
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

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).

About the Author

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of seven previous books of poetry, prose, and translation. The recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award, Phillips has been a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and an NAACP Image Award, and has been long-listed for the National Book Award for Poetry. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University and the poetry editor of The New Republic. His book in progress, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America will be published by FSG in 2025. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.