National Book Award Judges’ Citation

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. #NBAwards 2015 Poetry Finalist  http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2015_p_phillips.html#.VmdZ6LgrKUk