Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of two previous poetry collections, Heaven and The Ground. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In his latest collection, Longlisted for the National Book Award, Poetry, Heaven (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Phillips swerves elegantly from humor to heartbreak, from Colorado to Florida, from Dante’s Paradise to Homer’s Illiad, from knowledge to ignorance to awe, as he turns his gaze upward and outward, probing and upending notions of the beyond.
NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015