The Ground Poems

Rowan Ricardo Phillips's debut collection, The Ground, offers a poignant and precise vision of New York City, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11, transforming a generation's axis of fear into an object of poetic contemplation. Through supple and idiosyncratic poems, Phillips explores the origins of mankind, the self's development in the sensuous world, and the end of all things, blending the sharp realities of the contemporary with the enduring presence of the archaic.

With subtle formal sophistication and a keen sense of lyric possibility, the collection weaves together remixes, myths, and revamped translations, creating a landscape where lived experience and the life of the imagination are equally vivid and true. These poems, marked by fiery intelligence and inescapable music, invite readers to meditate on our fundamental connection to and estrangement from the natural world.