The poet Patrick Phillips’ stunning collection of elegies that bear witness to the small beauties and inevitable losses of our transient life.
An acute awareness of mortality gives Elegy for a Broken Machine a paradoxical, striking vitality. Whether writing about his father’s drawn-out illness, an old guitar, his small son’s school project, married and unmarried love, or the long-forgone pleasures of smoking, Patrick Phillips reminds us that love calls us to the things of this world in all its beauty, sorrow, comedy, and vanishing.