Song of the Closing Doors

"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." —2015 National Book Awards, Judges' Citation

"Phillips . . . examines masculinity and loss with a surgeon's precision in his elegiac third book. The figures of father and son, brother and husband, all play out here—often simultaneously—and Phillips's careful language consciously breaks down these distinctions, fusing the roles men play throughout their lives, and connecting past to present." —Publishers Weekly

"Prophetic . . . The poems do something in this collection that few other poems can do—they talk to each other, but they also talk to you. They haunt you. The uncanny nature of the images in the poems draw on Phillips’ memories as much as they draw on our own—those we have already and those we will come to have, soon enough." —Daniel Peña, The Adroit Journal