​Praise for Practitioner Joy Katie Sions Editor-in-Chief, Rumble Fish Quarterly
 
Murphy's poetry unfolds in an uncanny valley of sorts, where the landscape is both disturbingly post-human and credibly recognizable. These poems are airtight, laced with a delicate hodgepodge of technological absurdism and intergalactic longing. The reality in Murphy's lines is that our tools of escape - meditation, exercise, neighborly courtesies - are ineffective substitutes for a future in which present-day planet earth, Murphy's main antagonist, can be left behind. Taken as a whole, the book evokes the sensibility of Naked Lunch with only about a quarter of the surrealism, a tough truth to confront. “Work Quirk,” a poem from the collection, for a Pushcart Prize 2019 and remarked in her “Editors’ Note” introduction to the Winter 2018 issue, “Award-winning poet Rich Murphy offers up ‘Work Quirk,’ a poem that reads, and we mean this in the most complimentary terms possible, like a flesh-eating virus.”