Song of the Closing Doors: Poems

From New York City subway encounters to memories of pickup basketball games on Fourth Street, a love letter to the past, and to all the relationships and memories our homeplaces hold, from the National Book Award finalist.

I will consider a slice of pizza, opens Phillips’s poem Jubilate Civitas.
For rare among pleasures in Gotham, it is both / exquisite and blessedly cheap. Thus, as throughout this collection, he celebrates a simple pleasure that in a time of deceit … is honest and upright, steadfast and good ; even the busted buttons we press when waiting to cross the street make for elegy in a collection that brings us this poet at his burnished best.

Phillips finds his love of a complex, vibrant city extends to his dearest people-he writes for his friend Paul, dying of cancer; for his wife’s stormy eyes when they fight; for the baby boy he once woke at night to feed and change. All these and more pass through Phillips’s elegant yet colloquial lines, in a book that shines with love and honesty on every page. As he writes, If you’re reading this / we were once friends.