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 multi-layered 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-Teran, has performed the theatrical version of Sonoran Strange across the United States and in Europe as an open-air, theatre-in-the-round presentation that incorporates video, music, and bilingual spoken word.