Sonoran Strange
Sonoran Strange is a poem cycle about the Arizona-Sonoran borderlands, as told through the stories of historic, ironic, and sometimes ludicrous characters and events. Phillips's debut full-length collection, the book is a love letter to the desert and an indictment of human folly. Phillips's poetry is universal and historical: he addresses culture, the environment, and our borderlands history. Sonoran Strange is a land of contradictions. It is a land of settlement and manifest destiny, a land of indigenous and migrant cultures. The author includes notes on the poems that relay their historical and literary underpinnings for a multilayered look at Arizona's collisions. The mashup of imagery and English and Spanish language provides readers with an experience that is both enlightening and entertaining, ritualistic and educational. Phillips, with creative partner Adam Cooper-Terán, has performed the theatrical version of Sonoran Strange across the United States and in Europe as an open-air, theater-in-the-round presentation that incorporates video, music, and bilingual spoken word. For more information visit www.sonoranstrange.com.
From the first page of this moving collection, you know something has shifted: you're seeing this landscape as if for the first time, with all its beauty and all its scars, in language so precise it burns. Logan Phillips has understood a basic truth about the world we live in now: political borders may be real, but linguistic and cultural borders are not. In his able hands, this is cause for celebration.'--Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles: A Novel and cofounder of Radio Ambulante
Logan Phillips is a poet, fine artist, and performer based in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of several chapbooks and a codirector of the performance group Verbo•bala.
