Reckon

What’s it like to have been born in Tombstone, Arizona? In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.” As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios. With an original, searing voice, Reckon is an essential answer to the tough questions of past and future, inheritance and reinvention, all from the perspective of a boy stuck in the middle.

About the Author :
Logan Phillips is a poet and cultural worker in Tucson, Arizona, and is author of Sonoran Strange and the NoVoGRAFÍAS series.

Review :
“Logan Phillips shepherds readers through a searing multivalent interrogation of the settler in this powerful traversal across vital terrains of borderlands culture. A full-throated examination of which lives thrive and how death comes at you like a tourist trap in unceded lands trapped in the toxic amber of historical amnesia—no one comes out of Tombstone, Arizona, unscathed! This is also an epic social engagement for this trickster poet to tip his hat to the antecedent of sultry desert queerness—the cowboy. Phillips is in full bloom here, propelling language in a wild-style, radical tempo: a roiling rush’ creating the ultimate tableau vivant that unsettles assumptions about genre and discipline.”—Raquel Gutiérrez, author of Brown Neon “A rip-roaring historama in the shadows of Tombstone, let Reckon be both guide and trickster. The mirage is a saloon, the desert, the gunfight, the erotics of high noon and masculinity, the dazzle, and the ‘blood smear’ of whiteness against a set of sharpened teeth in these borderlands. Oh, let the performance be an indictment of that tussle. Ready, set, action!”—Sophia Terazawa, author of Tetra Nova “Come to Logan Phillips’s Reckon! Stay to learn what thirst is for! Come to confront a violent silence and stay for the mutoscope showdown! Born in Tombstone, Logan Phillips collages vivid, intelligent grace out of a desert landscape and the West’s national illusions. Flying through masculine silence, Reckon is the owl.”—Sesshu Foster, author of City of the Future “Reckon moves through las sierras fronterizas where legends rattle louder than truth and the land is dotted with stagecraft. In poems that layer image on memory, Logan Phillips collages a past both tender and troubled. These pages carry a cowboy’s wink, pero con mucho dolor, riding out those gunfight myths that cast a long shadow.”—Melani Martinez, author of The Molino “Reckon implodes the braggadocio and myth of the gunslinging West into a rubble of clarity and tenderness. Logan Phillips spirals into the archives of home and returns at sunset, dismantling western notions of masculinity, cinema, place, and memory. Phillips has assembled a collection that is polyphonic, visually expansive, and as sonically lush as it is texturally sumptuous. Reckon is a vital sigil that only the multimodal genius of Phillips can bind for the days ahead.”—Anthony Cody, Whiting Award winner “Reckon is a riveting multimedia meditation on the author’s hometown of Tombstone. In a precise, innovative lyric form, Phillips interrogates history, myth, colonialism, masculinity, Hollywood, and the making of the self. This book is a profound and necessary reconsideration of what it means to be from and of the West.”—Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun “Whoa! The day for reckoning with the violence that sustains gunslinger legends and places like Tombstone has come. Reckon cuts through the mythical to reveal how myths of courage and heroism have injured and distorted not only history but also the human spirit. For the author, it has taken a lifetime to see through, heal from, and name the damage. Drawing on film, newspapers, family, and institutional archives, a poet who has long written from his deep love for Arizona confronts masculinity, violence, and cultural inheritance in a work that is as insightful, tender, and creative as it is urgent.”—Lydia R. Otero, author of La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City “Part memoir and part excavation, Reckon examines the simulacrum of the American Southwest and its ‘mannequin masculinity,’ where a 15-second shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, bastardized a region's history for 150 years. With lush, innovative language, Phillips collages an intimate portrait of history and inheritance into a stellar and crucial work of art.”—Bojan Louis, author of Sinking Bell: Stories “Phillips excavates Hollywood’s undead and takes to task the simulated cowboy world in which he was raised in Tombstone, Arizona. A multimodal love-hate letter to Val Kilmer and simulated southwest colonialism. Reckon is a gorgeous, blooming, and booming voice of southern Arizona’s past and present.”—Gabriel Dozal, author of The Border Simulator “Logan Phillips’s Reckon is a hell of a book. More daring than pretty much everyone working with a wild interplay of text and image, found and made, Phillips transforms the town and tale of Tombstone, Arizona, into a celebration of mouth and mirth and myth. Phillips knows a masculinity that can’t see itself, appreciate its beauty and its terror, and laugh at its own excesses won’t have long to live. So lucky us: Reckon looks to have a real long life. Arizona needs this book. America needs this book. You do too.”—Ander Monson, author of Predator: A Movie, a Memoir, an Obsession “Logan Phillips explores the making of legend, myth, identity, and history in this scrapbook narrative of memory and documentary evidence, asking the important question: which came first, the story or the act? Phillips probes the tropes and clichÉs that surround his hometown of Tombstone, Arizona, and its place in public and private imaginaries of the West, while examining how that place formed him as a writer and a male in the twenty-first-century borderlands.”—Jennifer Jenkins, author of Celluloid Pueblo: Western Ways Films and the Invention of the Postwar Southwest