Reckon book cover
forthcoming from university of arizona press, february 2026
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.
With an original, searing voice, Reckon is an essential answer to the tough questions of past and future, inheritance and reinvention, all from the perspective of a boy stuck in the middle.
“‘This isn’t poetry, this is the news.’ I’ve never read a book like Logan Phillips’ Reckon. It’s almost not accurate to call it a book—it transcends genre, mixing history, personal narrative, myth, memoir, and poetry. Here is an ‘American’ truly reckoning with his family’s past, the country’s past, and in the process, creating a roadmap for others to follow. Through Reckon, Phillips has given to us an alchemical text. Not only do we bear witness to a singular life in a singular town in a singular world—which, in itself, is powerful; we are also shown the larger implications of what empire does, what patriarchy demands, and what whiteness erases. Reckon illuminates all that tries to hide—and then, with love and determination, invites us all to help keep it in the light.”