Photo by Sue Kwon
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a poet, essayist, critic, and translator. He is the author of the poetry collections The Ground, Heaven, Living Weapon, and Silver, and of The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. His next book, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2027. His honors include the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Presidential Professor and Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University and the poetry editor of The New Republic. He lives in New York and Barcelona.more…
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. more…
“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.
