Silver: Poems

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s fourth collection is a book as lustrous as the metal of its title.

This beautiful, slender collection--small and weighted like a coin--is Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as lyrical as they are virtuosic. ＂Not the meaning,＂ Phillips writes, ＂but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life＂ powers these poems as they conjure their prismatic array of characters, textures, and moods. As it reverberates through several styles (blank verse, elegy, terza rima, rhyme royal, translation, rap), Silver reimagines them with such extraordinary vision and alluring strangeness that they sound irrepressibly fresh and vibrant. From beginning to end, Silver is a collection that reflects Phillips’s guiding principle--＂part physics, part faith, part void＂--that all is reflected in poetry and poetry is reflected in all.

This is work that brings into acute focus the singular and glorious power of poetry in our complex world.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of seven previous books of poetry, prose, and translation. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ 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 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 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, is forthcoming from FSG. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.