Heaven: Poems

Heaven: Poems

<p><b>One of <i>The Washington Post</i>'s Best Poetry Collections of 2015</b><br><b>One of NPR's Best Books of 2015</b><br><b>One of <i>Flavorwire</i>'s Best Poetry Books of 2015</b><br><b>Long-listed for the National Book Award in poetry</b><br><b>Long-listed</b> <b>for the 2016 </b><b>PEN Open Book Award</b></p><p>"Who the hell's heaven is this?" Rowan Ricardo Phillips offers many answers, and none at all, in <i>Heaven</i>, the piercing and revelatory encore to his award-winning debut, <i>The Ground</i>. Swerving elegantly from humor to heartbreak, from Colorado to Florida, from Dante's <i>Paradise</i> to Homer's <i>Iliad</i>, from knowledge to ignorance to awe, Phillips turns his gaze upward and outward, probing and upending notions of the beyond.</p><p> "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 <i>Measure for Measure</i>, 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.</p><p> "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.</p>