The University of Arizona Press
January 22, 2026
Today we share a poetry playlist by Logan Phillips, author of Reckon, featuring songs that illuminate the author’s creative process.
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.
Read (and listen along with) Phillips’ playlist below:
I’m so lucky to have inherited a love of music from my parents, who filled my childhood with albums across the shifting formats of the era: vinyl to cassette to CD to vinyl again, with a couple inexplicable 8-tracks lurking around. I’ve spent many of my adult years working as a DJ, still in love with how music brings us together. But writing requires endless hours of solitude, so this playlist turns to ambient/drone/African blues/doom metal, especially the records that were in heavy rotation during the writing of Reckon.
(Speaking of music formats, I’ll briefly point out that there’s probably no ethical way to have access to all music ever recorded for $11.99 a month, especially when the corporation selling the subscription has the poor practices and the dubious morals of Spotify or the other corporations eviscerating the arts economy. Where possible, links in this playlist point to Bandcamp, which is the platform I use, and probably the best online option for musicians trying to survive and make art in 2026.)
Track #1: “Foreign Smokes,” BCMC. 2023.
That cold, liminal air under the first gray-blue of dawn. While writing Reckon I started my days with a song like this one (“Birds” by SUSS is another): a song still loose in mind, with glimpses of dreams, elided pasts, possible futures.
Track #2: “Sundown,” Barn Owl. 2010.
The window of my study faces east, and I write through the dawn hours. Though this track is called “Sundown,” it will always remind me of the inflection point in the morning ritual: sun staring into my eyes, page-screen blurred, fully lost in the poem-memory-vision, volume extremely loud. Hard to pick a single song off “Ancestral Star” since I always let the whole record run—“Sundown” is the opening—“Awakening” might be the actual key cut.
Track #3: “WZN#3,” 75 Dollar Bill. 2019.
Jim Simmerman, one of my early poetry mentors, told me in 2003 that “90% of what is interesting about repetition is variation.” Maybe that means the point of a pattern is to break it, setting up an expectation in order to have the chance to subvert it. The movement of this song reminds me of the arc of a writing session—an arrhythmic riffing gathering sounds before coalescing around a relentless beat and riding that rhythm wherever it may take us—into chaos and back again, over and over and over, dizzy.
Track #4: “Jbit Aala Khiam,” Tapan Meets Génération Taragalte. 2019.
Picking up where the 75 Dollar Bill left off (like any DJ transition worth the salt), this record is a one-off collab between a Moroccan/Touareg desert blues group and Serbian electronic producer. I’m struck by how deserts can sound so similar, regardless of hemisphere. Amps cranked, bouncing among the canyon walls or lost out to the swirling horizon. I get lost in here, a necessary condition for the writing of poetry.
Track #5: “Jerusalem, Part 1,” Sleep. 1996.
No way around it—there’s going to be either Earth or Sleep on this playlist. And if it’s not Sleep’s album-length alternative take “Dopesmoker,” it’s this one. If metal isn’t your thing, substitute with Pixies “Silver” (silver being Tombstone’s raison d’etre)—but on repeat no less than five times in a row, please. In any case, no honest look at “The American West” can avoid seeing the violence—not just the atomized, romanticized individual gunfighter—but the systemic grind of genocide and its engine: capitalism. It’s dark, especially knowing that it touches my family’s history, as it touches everyone alive today in one way or another. There’s no healing without first looking at the wound: understanding its depths, contours and causes. One part of Reckon is my attempt to not look away from the violence that has benefited me. Doom metal helps me sustain the gaze.
Bonus Tracks:
“Hours in the Evening,” Sarah Davachi. 2018.
Then this distortion falls away and we’re left with the hum of the rocks under a forgiving winter sun. I might have spent more hours listening to Davachi—an incredibly prolific Canadian composer—than any other single artist in the last few years. Bitchin’ Bajas would be a close second. There’s something about drone music that takes me out of time: of course there’s no beat (time measure) but I mean the voice of the rocks, the rush of the blood, throbbing ebb of a little lifetime.
“Abusey Junction,” KOKOROKO. 2019.
There’s so much grief inherent in gazing through the concentric circles of time. Not only when looking at capital ‘H’ History, but even when feeling into personal memories, the ephemeral beauty of them. The word nostalgia has at its (ancient Greek) root the longing to return home, an impossible, often dislocated desire. This cut hits deep for me. I can never truly return to the early, quiet bliss, fully held by love and land—and it may never have existed quite as I remember it anyway. So, what’s to do other than carry it deep down, tending and honoring love’s small flame without asking too much of it, handwriting a hearth of poems where others might catch glimpses from time to time, doing my best to pass it to the children in my life.
Logan 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, including the NoVoGRAFíAS series (2009–present). A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects. He completed an MFA at the University of Arizona. www.dirtyverbs.com.
