Heaven

One of The Washington Post''s Best Poetry Collections of 2015One of NPR''s Best Books of 2015Long-listed for the National Book Award in poetry. Who the hell''s heaven is this? Rowan Ricardo Phillips offers many answers and none at all in Heaven the piercing and revelatory encore to his award-winning debut The Ground. Swerving elegantly from humor to heartbreak from Colorado to Florida from Dante''s Paradise to Homer''s Iliad from knowledge to ignorance to awe Phillips turns his gaze upward and outward probing and upending notions of the beyond.. Feeling real feeling / with all its faulty / Architecture is / Beyond a god''s touch—but it does not elude Phillips. Meditating on feverish boyhood on two paintings by Chuck Close on Shakespeare''s Measure for Measure on a dead rooster by the side of the road in Ohio on an elk grazing outside his window his language remains eternally intoxicating full of play pathos and surprise.. The end he writes like / All I''ve ever told you is uncertain. Or elsewhere: The only way then to know a truth / Is to squint in its direction and poke. Phillips—who received a 2013 Whiting Writers'' Award as well as the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award—may not be certain but as he squints and pokes in the direction of truth his power of perception and elegance of expression create a place where beauty and truth come together and drift apart like a planet orbiting its star. The result is a book whose lush and wounding beauty will leave its mark on readers long after they''ve turned the last page.