“I’ve never read a book like Logan Phillips’ Reckon… 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… Reckon illuminates all that tries to hide.” — JAVIER ZAMORA, author of Solito: A Memoir

“Logan Phillips’s Reckon is a hell of a book. More daring than pretty much everyone working with a wild interplay of text and image, found and made, Phillips transforms the town and tale of Tombstone, Arizona, into a celebration of mouth and mirth and myth… Arizona needs this book. America needs this book. You do too.” — ANDER MONSON, author of Predator: A Movie, a Memoir, an Obsession

In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town of Tombstone 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, whiteness, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.”

As innovative as it is moving, this auto-ethnography 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.

Cover: art by Logan Phillips, design by Leigh McDonald. Author photo by Lance Thorn.

“A full-throated consideration of the antecedent of sultry desert queerness—the cowboy.” — RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ, author of Brown Neon

“Reckon implodes the braggadocio and myth of the gunslinging West.” — ANTHONY CODY, Whiting Award winner

“Flying through masculine silence, Reckon is the owl.” — SESSHU FOSTER, author of City of the Future

“Whoa! The day for reckoning with the violence that sustains gunslinger legends and places like Tombstone has come. Reckon cuts through the mythical to reveal how myths of courage and heroism have injured and distorted not only history but also the human spirit. For the author, it has taken a lifetime to see through, heal from, and name the damage. Drawing on film, newspapers, family, and institutional archives, a poet who has long written from his deep love for Arizona confronts masculinity, violence, and cultural inheritance in a work that is as insightful, tender, and creative as it is urgent.”—LYDIA R. OTERO, author of La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City

“Reckon moves through las sierras fronterizas where legends rattle louder than truth and the land is dotted with stagecraft. In poems that layer image on memory, Logan Phillips collages a past both tender and troubled. These pages carry a cowboy’s wink, pero con mucho dolor, riding out those gunfight myths that cast a long shadow.”—MELANI MARTINEZ, author of The Molino

“Part memoir and part excavation, Reckon examines the simulacrum of the American Southwest and its ‘mannequin masculinity,’ where a 15-second shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, bastardized a region's history for 150 years. With lush, innovative language, Phillips collages an intimate portrait of history and inheritance into a stellar and crucial work of art.”—BOJAN LOUIS, author of Sinking Bell: Stories

“Phillips excavates Hollywood’s undead and takes to task the simulated cowboy world in which he was raised in Tombstone, Arizona. A multimodal love-hate letter to Val Kilmer and simulated southwest colonialism. Reckon is a gorgeous, blooming, and booming voice of southern Arizona’s past and present.”—GABRIEL DOZAL, author of The Border Simulator

“A rip-roaring historama in the shadows of Tombstone, let Reckon be both guide and trickster. The mirage is a saloon, the desert, the gunfight, the erotics of high noon and masculinity, the dazzle, and the ‘blood smear’ of whiteness against a set of sharpened teeth in these borderlands. Oh, let the performance be an indictment of that tussle. Ready, set, action!”—SOPHIA TERAZAWA, author of Tetra Nova