Xan Forest Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for emerging writers, Xan has received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Brown University. Their poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Their chapbook Reasons for Smoking won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. HULL, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, is their first book. They are working on a nonfiction manuscript titled Presenting as Blue/Aspiring to Green, about color theory, gender, and modes of making.
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HULLFrom"Ode to a Vibrator Left on All Night"
Though I cannot lavish praise on stamina
alone, I must acknowledge a femmefortitude. Last night, I tell myself,
a misstep at battery’s expenseso as to never consider the sentience
of a pleasure machine.How her trembling must have lullabied
my drunk tongue the intricaciesof sexual decorum even in sleep,
how she may have throbbedall night beside me, anticipating her
own reciprocal and tender invasion.
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HULLFrom"Nativity"
when I hemorrhage against design it ain’t incognito. the neighbors walk their dogs past me. that’s me smoking in the alley, letting roses from my wrists. petal to puddle, a misgendering of matter. these hooves unhinge themselves as tiny meteors to cudgel dusk. I redress the splintering woodwork notched to my likeness, venial beneath the pomme and lilac cornucopic delight. to partake in a gender, to do so as a participant, and to fashion one’s self a living process of gender is like casting a net of postures, adornment objects, and grooming techniques into a future tense. where have I gone, and who have I built to take my place?
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HULLFrom"Poem Where I Refuse to Talk about —"
I want the sweat of boyhood
its ease and virtue on my neck
I want my nature known
because I am the softest
I can ever be in this moment
when I don’t rough my mutt
hands on their throats
for making terrible light of
the second-hand the sub
-human my survival
instead I talk to grass
but a sapling myself
I am made everyday like a bed
like a person makes another
and nothing ever asks to be made
HULL:Poems
“When I read [HULL], I am reminded of the ways in which language can be repurposed as an amplification device against narratives that seek to erase, bury, and diminish. These poems articulate how living, touching, noticing, speaking, and remembering are necessary and subversive acts.” —Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric
“HULL is a reminder of our collective endeavor to swim murky waters, shark-ridden seas, just to feel our kin, to kiss our loves, to remember our tongues, to make a life.” ―Deria M., The Bind
"HULL is not a balm or teaching tool, rather it’s a territory that Phillips establishes and then asks us to look upon." ―Laura Jeanne K, Entropy
Reveling in brevity and lushness, Xan Forest Phillips’s poems feel revolutionary: formally superb, but with a constant tilting of expectation in image and phrase. Phillips writes about intimacy as intimately as possible, writes about pain as painfully as possible, writes about joy as joyfully as possible. These poems aren’t afraid to get messy, with risky extended similes and unresolved contradictions. We feel the body’s sexuality, but also its vulnerability; we feel its history of violation, but also its resistance of those violations through the making of meaning; we feel its capacity to love, and its capacity to give.