Heaven
Poems
ISBN10: 0374536228
ISBN13: 9780374536220
Trade Paperback
80 Pages
$16.00
CA$22.00
Long-listed for the National Book Award in poetry
Long-listed for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award
"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." Phillips—who received a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award as well as the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award—may 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.
Reviews
Praise for Heaven
"This slim volume is full of grace and beauty . . . [Phillips] his language is hauntingly astute, and the reality he conjures is multi-layered."—The Washington Post
"Heaven exists as a series of displacements. Its voice inhabits various languages—English, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian—and locations: Los Angeles, the Colorado Rockies, ancient Troy, Paris, New York City. This elusiveness, this refusal of hardened categories and identities, is a poetics of resistance built into speaking, one that, like creole, blends many tongues . . . Repetition can cut both ways—to delimit or to unfold—and Phillips skillfully uses both to great effect. (It’s not a coincidence that his book of essays from 2010 is titled When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness.) This is language turning against itself—sometimes gently, sometimes sharply—as all poetic language does . . . Many of the poems in Heaven function this way with their proportional stanzas, their slipping in and out of conventional prosody, their classical references transfigured into cultural moments both private and shared . . . Equally important is Phillips’s emphasis on letting the strange remain strange, letting difference remain difference, because social and political progress entails learning to speak across differences as much as similarities."—Alan Gilbert, Bookforum