Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of Heaven (2015) and The Ground (2012), winner of the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the 2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award in Poetry, a finalist for the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. He is also the author of a book of criticism, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (2010), and the translator of Salvador Espriu's classic Catalan collection of short stories, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (2012). Born and raised in New York City, he is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Brown University, where he attained his doctorate in English Literature. Phillips has taught in Harvard's History and Literature Program and Columbia's Graduate School of the Arts, Princeton's Program in Creative Writing and is currently an associate professor of English at Stony Brook University, where he directs the Poetry Center.
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The GroundPoemsFrom"Terra Incognita"
I plugged my poem into a manhole cover
That flamed into the first guitar,
Jarred the asphalt and tar to ash,
And made from where there once was
Ground a sound to stand on.
The Ground:Poems -
The GroundPoemsFrom"Over the Counties of Kings and Queens Came the Second Idea"
I stared out into the darkness
For some sign of the cold consoler,
That perched spinning
Night nurse who tendsTo the sleeping sun
Destined to rise irresponsibly
Over the counties
Of Kings and Queens.
The Ground:Poems -
The GroundPoemsFrom"Sheep Meadow"
The same motion used
To make angels in the snow,
When standing
Is a signal of distress:
A frantic wave of the shipwrecked
To a distant, passing savior.
The Ground:Poems
“In Heaven, Rowan Ricardo Phillips explores what heaven is—or might be. As with Phillips's first collection, The Ground, which won the 2013 Whiting Award, this slim volume is full of grace and beauty . . . No matter where he goes, his language is hauntingly astute, and the reality he conjures is multi-layered.” —Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post
“Rowan Ricardo Philips, with his first book The Ground, proves to be a master of the art. He can be visceral; he can be ethereal; he is original. All this comes from the collective power of knowing his literary antecedents and using this to find his own identity . . . The result is experimentation with graphic clarity.” —Grace Cavalieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books
“Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ debut collection The Ground marks the arrival of a virtuoso poetic voice. From New York in the often surreal aftermath of 9/11, to the deep underworlds of ancient mythology, to the trans-continental heritage and childhood of Phillips himself, these are poems with a restless agility that make the terrain beneath your feet more mysterious.” —Granta
Selected Works
- Print Books
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“The Ground is a contemporary portrait of New York City with striking historical vignettes going all the way back to the Dutch 17th century. With rigor, whimsy, brilliance and metaphysical depth, Mr. Phillips extends the exploration of the city that we know in Hart Cane’s and Frank O’Hara’s work, but this is Mr. Phillips’s singular world, through and through. A superb collection, varied in range of reference, stunning in the power of its artistry and in the modulation of feeling and form.”