POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION Living Weapon 'is in conversation with a vast cast of historic forebears who enliven Phillips's examination of the meaning, morality and musicality of poetry, his 'living weapon'. . . and he is an eloquent and persuasive converser.' Kate Caoimhe Arthur, PN Review 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).

A work that reminds us of the singular and glorious power of poetry in our complex world. Silver is a collection that shines with a guiding principle, that poetry: 'part physics, part faith, part void', can be found wherever it is looked for. Virtuosic in style, sharing the dexterity of the legendary Argentinian footballer, Lionel Messi, who is conjured in its pages, the poems shape-shift through blank verse, elegy, terza rima and rap. Phillips is confident in his unconfidence: 'Not the meaning,' he writes, 'but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life'. The poems are luminous and dreamlike in their evocations of time and place, held in the light of a silvery moon that gives them their alluring strangeness and vibrancy.

In The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, the award-winning poet - and Paris Review sports columnist - Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates the calendar year. And like the year, it's divided into four seasons, each marked by a final tournament: the Grand Slams. Phillips charts the year from winter's Australian Open, where Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal renewed their rivalry in a match for the ages, to fall's U.S. Open. Along the way, Phillips paints a new, vibrant portrait of tennis, one that captures not only the emotions, nerves, and ruthless tactics of the point-by-point game but also the quicksilver movement of victory and defeat on the tour, placing that sense of upheaval within a broader cultural and social context. Tennis has long been thought of as an escapist spectacle: a bucolic, separate bauble of life. The Circuit will convince you that you don't leave the world behind as you watch tennis - you bring it with you.

A masterful debut from a powerfully original poetic voice
A poignant and terse vision of New York City unfolds in Rowan Ricardo Phillips's debut book of poetry. A work of rare beauty and grace, "The Ground" is an entire world, drawn and revealed through contemplation of the post-9/11 landscape. With musicality and precision of thought, Phillips's poems limn the troubadour's journey in an increasingly surreal modern world ("I plugged my poem into a manhole cover / That flamed into the first guitar"). The origin of mankind, the origin of the self, the self's development in the sensuous world, and--in both a literal and a figurative sense--the end of all things sing through Phillips's supple and idiosyncratic poems. The poet's subtle formal sophistication--somewhere between flair and restraint--and sense of lyric possibility bring together the hard glint of the contemporary world and the eroded permanence of the archaic one through remixes, underground sessions, Spenserian stanzas, myths, and revamped translations. These are poems of fiery intelligence, inescapable music, and metaphysical splendor that concern themselves with lived life and the life of the imagination--both equally vivid and true--as they lay the framework for Phillips's meditations on our connection to and estrangement from the natural world.