The University of Arizona Press
February 25, 2026
The Border Chronicle podcast features an interview with Logan Phillips author of Reckon. Phillips is a poet and cultural worker based in Tucson, Arizona (traditional lands of the Tohono O’odham). He is author of Sonoran Strange, alongside numerous poetry chapbooks and art books. A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects.
When asked about how Reckon shifts between poetry and essays, Phillips replied, “I was really not interested in pre-determining the outcome. This book was about writing the questions, and not knowing [the format of the answers]. And in that not-knowing, I became very genre-agnostic and let the piece decide for itself if it wanted to use line breaks or if it was using paragraphs. Genre itself is part of the way we frame history: when we take complex human contradictory history and try to fit it into a Hollywood movie plot, there are going to be things that are left out of that inherently.”
Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
About the book:
What’s it like to have been born in Tombstone, Arizona?
In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.”
As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios.
