HULL

In this debut collection, Phillips’s poems breathe a story as long as time, in which history holds to its pattern of the same crimes committed again and again against the Black body. Into a world where it is still audacious to speak truth, they exhale condemnation, reclamation, empathy and light.

In the tradition of Natasha Trethewey and Danez Smith, Phillips sees a through line from slavery to racism past and present. HULL is their bold indictment of prejudice.

Two poems from HULL featured in BOMB! Click here to read.

Xan Phillips interviewed by Logan February for The Aldroit Journal! Click here to read.

Xan Phillips talks about HULL with Franny Choi & Danez Smith on The VS Podcast – listen here!

Xan Phillips interviewed by Ruben Quesada for the Kenyon Review! Click here to read.

Xan Phillips’s debut collection, Hull, is vast in both ambition and scope, striving to capture the depths and complexity of queer diasporic African identity in verse that is as fierce as it is tender and searing as it is celebratory. And, like the oceanic waters of the Middle Passage that serve as its fulcrum, Hull has immeasurable depths and dangers swirling beneath its surface.

Xan Phillips & HULL featured in Autostraddle’s “Eight Black LGBTQ Poets To Give Your Flowers To Right Now“:

Phillips’ work often deals with that intimacy and the greater question of being a vulnerable person in the world. Their poems confront the history and the present together in the same room, while discussing the intricacies of being a black queer person in a post-colonial world.

Hull is a reminder of our collective endeavor to swim murky waters, shark-ridden seas, just to feel our kin, to kiss our loves, to remember our tongues, to make a life.

Xan Phillips in conversation about HULL with Lucy Hayes in The Rumpus! Click here to read.

Xan Phillips interviewed by Brian Gentes after winning the Judith A. Markowitz Award!

“My favorite approach to writing has been to switch between it and painting for the duration of the day. When the paint is drying, I write. When the draft is settling, I paint. The longer I paint, the more sensitive I become to fonts.”

Click here to read the full interview!

Hull demonstrates Phillips’s ability to expand the lyric to its breaking point, which makes this book a promising debut.

Phillips’ book is a hand carved hull. A collection of wet darkness holding celestial, limitless Black bodies, which exist repeatedly between history’s most nefarious building blocks of white supremacy and 21st century diaspora… Hull is not a balm or teaching tool, rather it’s a territory that Phillips establishes and then asks us to look upon.

Phillips produces an account of Black existence, while also summoning breath, touch, and taste as tools of emancipation and resistance.

Click here to view Xan Phillips’s interview with Darshita Jain!