Elegy For a Broken Machine, Patrick Phillips’ unapologetically analog third collection, invokes stoicism from its first page: “Listen,” the speaker’s father says to him in a dream, setting down his wrench in the family garage, “dying’s just something / that happens sometimes.” To some extent, the rest of the collection belies this stoicism, attempting, and mostly failing, “not to stare at the there-/but-for-the-grace-of-God-/go-I” of death, circling it relentlessly while struggling to illuminate it.

That’s not a criticism. Not solely. Phillips’ spare lyrics and allegorical approach to metaphor make clear that he’s addressing his subject matter obliquely. A necessity, perhaps, given its inherently unknowable nature, which reduces language (even the heightened register of poetry) to so much “glued on / cotton mist.” Much here will feel familiar—the “half-light” and “terrible dark” and “keening” gulls that all signal lyric content—but Phillips takes his central conceit seriously, and, through relentless interrogation, steers Elegy into intriguing territory. Here, even the family is a kind of assembly line, a process of mechanical reproduction. In “Barbershop,” for instance, a mirror “casts / my son’s grandsons into infinity before me,” while “father’s fathers / stretch behind,” and in “Mercy,” pain-as-play is handed down generationally, from father, to speaker, to sons.

Phillips flirts with capitalism’s tendency to confuse and conflate its machines and the men who operate them but ultimately steers away from the body-at-work, opting instead to romanticize the hard-edged, soft-centered working-class citizens that populated a certain brand of mid-to-late 20th century American poetry. These men are grimy and tough, a little too boozy, perhaps, but sensitive, too. The result, a kind of dioramic nostalgia, leaves important things implied but unsaid. By pining for Fordism’s unhidden physical costs, Phillips’ poems suggest that the real enemy resides elsewhere, unobserved because unobservable, sealed within impenetrably complex mathematical models hatched on the highest floors of the tallest buildings in our biggest cities: the obscurity, precarity, and endless ethical compromise of flexible accumulation.

More importantly, Phillips puts his nostalgia to work, repurposing convention to substantive and substantial ends. His use of familiar lyric devices (of lineation, images, typography) foregrounds the biomechanical machinery behind “the lyric poem,” itself an engine fueled by tradition and influence (in Phillips’ case Auden, Justice and Vallejo, Roethke, Levis, Levine loom large). That the collection does not take us anywhere new with regard to the body, capitalism, or death is no surprise, and no matter. Elegy for a Broken Body makes clear that it’s not innovation but attention that counts: “even the silence, / if you listened, / meant something.”