Living Weapon

Starred review from January 20, 2020
In his dazzling third collection, Phillips (Heaven) explores social ills while celebrating poetry’s ability to provide solace and sense during times of upheaval. Two prose poems anchor the book: the first, the standout of the collection, is “1776,” in which Phillips imagines himself as a winged angel standing atop the Freedom Tower in New York City, observing the city below: “Lit streets run from it, electric arteries and veins. Manhattan’s never seemed so empty, so narrow, a pupil of a cat’s eye.” Phillips imbues the book with the divisiveness and violence of the present moment: “We are all in prison./ This is the brutal lesson of the slouching century,// Swilled like a sour stone/ Through the vein of the beast.” In “Mortality Ode,” he narrates a scene in which several police officers enter a cellphone store and browse casually. Nothing dramatic occurs, but the simple presence of the officers conveys a tension born from the speaker’s subtle understanding that the police are a threat to his safety. In “Thoughts and Prayers,” Phillips addresses the subject of gun violence directly, declaring that the refusal to take action to stop the epidemic is the real evil: “the end of endings; the death/ Of change.” Phillips’s latest is lyrical, imaginative, and steeped in a keen understanding of current events.

February 1, 2020

In his third collection (after Heaven, a National Book Award finalist), Phillips bookends a core set of poems between two longer prose pieces. The opening one, which has a Borgesian fairy tale-like quality, concerns a man who flies over New York and perches on the spire of the World Trade Center--"Flight is like untying the air itself, fold after fold and layer after layer"--while the closing piece is a travelog about Barcelona. In between, poems tackle current subjects such as digital vs. analog life, climate warming, and the Charlottesville, VA, white supremacist march. Several are based on myth; a couple of the best follow the Ars Poetica form. In "Night of the Election," a Seamus Heaney poem disappears and an oyster "Appeared on a plate, languid, the color/ Of vanilla, moist fennel, raw silver,/ Crushed hay, sunk ships, quince and Jupiter." Unfortunately, too many poems use repetition and sometimes rhyme to poor effect: "the worlds in it burning, ways/ Of I am now burning, feeling the Bern/ In the back of a cab without being burned,/ Then being burned. I wonder what learned." VERDICT An uneven but interesting collection showcasing life in New York City today, sometimes veering toward dull, ordinary language and sometimes singing with their take on society. For larger collections.--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

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