What Comes from a Thing

Book excerpt: Poetry. California Interest. Phillip Barron's WHAT COMES FROM A THING is the winner of the 2015 Michael Rubin Book Award. The Michael Rubin Book Award is a single-author, first-book award that memorializes the celebrated SFSU lecturer, and is selected by an independently solicited judge and published by Fourteen Hills Press. "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... 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"