Winner of the 2019 Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association

Winner of the 2015 Michael Rubin Book Award

What Comes from a Thing is the first collection of poetry from Phillip Barron. This volume takes as its subjects presence and absence after the death of manufacturing and the disintegration of the working class under twenty-first century capitalism. These poems embody the sounds and rhythms of factories, industrial farmlands, and ports of late modernity. Whether rural or urban, the places—like the aesthetics—of these poems have survived the shift to a post-industrial economy and merit deep attention for the role they play in constructing the materiality and ideal of our daily experiences. The book resides in this very tension between idealism and materialism, where “we manufacture footnotes now, echoes of all else/that we have forgotten/how to make.”