by Phillip Barron, winner of the 2015 MRBA

 

"Phillip Barron’s What Comes from a Thing renders the familiar strange again, and so offers us the rare opportunity to re-encounter what we think we know. A mapping and re-mapping of our concurrent worlds, these poems explore the shifting overlays of industrial landscape, post-industrial landscape, the “natural” world, and all the worlds that exist among them: location is never where we left it. Barron stitches through time a tracery of telephone poles, contrails, water, and railroads, bodies of granaries and birds, factories and fields, as he probes received ideas of identity and relation. What Comes from a Thing investigates what it can mean to be alive to our 21st century existence, bathing in the mortar/ reeds and ruin."

-- Laura Walker, author of rimertown/ an atlas

 

Phillip Barron grew up in Florida and South Carolina and studied at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a Master of Arts degree in philosophy. He currently teaches courses in philosophy and the humanities at Woodland Community College while he finishes a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University. What Comes from a Thing is his first book of poetry. 

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