Have you ever had a private moment — perhaps in the middle of the night — in a large city? When it just seems like it’s you and the great dreaming metropolis? Rowan Ricardo Phillips brings us into a memory he can’t forget, complete with a Wu-Tang Clan soundtrack.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist, and translator. His poetry collections include The Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), Heaven (2015), Living Weapon (2020), and the forthcoming Silver (2024). He is also the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (a new, forthcoming edition from Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey (Picador, 2019). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Whiting Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award.
Phillips is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the president of the board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic. Phillips received his doctoral degree in English literature from Brown University.
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
We’re pleased to offer Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
Thomas Lux — Refrigerator, 1957
Rita Wong — flush
Maria Dahvana Headley — Beowulf
Michael Klein — Swale
Ray Young Bear — Our Bird Aegis
Suji Kwock Kim — Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border
Amber McBride — ROLL CALL: NEW TAROT NAMES FOR BLACK GIRLS
Carl Dennis — Breath
Elisa Gonzalez — To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self
Ofelia Zepeda — Deer Dance Exhibition
Sandra Cisneros — When in Doubt
Kandace Siobhan Walker — Three Mangoes, £1
Francisco Aragón — Asleep You Become a Continent
Conor Kerr — Winter Songs
Valencia Robin — The Coup
Eugenia Leigh — How the Dung Beetle Finds Its Way Home
Poetry Unbound — Season 8 Trailer
Clint Smith with Krista Tippett — What We Know in the "Marrow of Our Bones"
BONUS: Truth-seeking and the Symphony of Language with Henri Cole
BONUS: Making Space for the Erotic with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
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