Reckon - Softcover

Logan Phillips

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816555826 ISBN 13: 9780816555826

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2026

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Logan Phillips is a poet and cultural worker in Tucson, Arizona, and is author of Sonoran Strange and the NoVoGRAFÍAS series.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816555826
• ISBN 13: 9780816555826
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172