Gunfights Gunfights Gunfights: A Podcast with Poet Logan Phillips

Logan Phillips was born in Tombstone, Arizona—a town best known for Old West-themed gunfight tourism. In his new book, Reckon, Phillips explores his relationship to the unusual setting of his childhood through themes of masculinity, history, and land.

Gunfights Gunfights Gunfights: A Podcast with Poet Logan Phillips
A sign for Tombstone, Arizona in 1937. (Image: Dorothea Lange/Farm Security Administration)

Tombstone, Arizona calls itself “The Town too Tough to Die.” It has an Old West-themed Main Street and daily re-enactments of gunfights. For most people, it’s a place to briefly drop into in order to experience a Disneyland-style version of Arizona history.

For Logan Phillips, however, Tombstone was once home. The Tucson, Arizona-based poet was born in the town and grew up nearby. His father worked at the town’s Historic Courthouse Museum; his uncle was an actor in Westerns. Phillips’s new book, Reckon, out now from University of Arizona Press, examines what it means to be from a place that glorifies violent, colonial masculinity—and seeks to find a way forward though family, relationships to land, and reckoning with history.

In this episode of the Border Chronicle podcast, Caroline Tracey is joined by Phillips to discuss his new book and what it means to be born in the contemporary “Old West."

Reckon by Logan Phillips (Image: University of Arizona Press)

Want to read on? Reckon can be purchased from the Border Chronicle's storefront on Bookshop.org.

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