Heaven

Rowan Ricardo Phillips returns with this second poetry collection, following his acclaimed debut, The Ground. The book roams widely in subject and setting, moving between Colorado and Florida and between the afterlife imagined in Dante's Paradiso and the battlefields of Homer's epic. Its speaker shifts from laughter to grief and from what he knows to what he cannot, approaching the unseen with curiosity rather than certainty.

Phillips writes about a range of ordinary and unusual things: a feverish childhood illness, two paintings by Chuck Close, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, a dead rooster on an Ohio roadside, and an elk grazing beyond his window. Playfulness and sorrow sit side by side throughout, and the language stays inventive and surprising from one poem to the next. Questions of truth and perception run through the collection, as the poet admits his limits while still searching for meaning.

Phillips has received a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award and the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Readers drawn to contemporary poetry about faith, mortality and art will find much to consider in this collection, which lingers long after its final page.