Poetry
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Murphy's particular genius is his ability to see the connections, the invidious logic of this culture. But this collection marks an important change in his oeuvre; his gaze has shifted towards a Stevens-like recentering, a refocus around his own pressing humanity. |
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Rich Murphy's Space Craft is a reflection on our millennial anxieties and crises of individualism. Prying open the human machine to reveal the illusion inside, he suggests we embrace the 'organism harmonics' of the cosmos instead. His poetic dissection of the human condition has us questioning how long we'll continue calling out to the empty 'I am' while popping our pills and tending to our rose gardens. This is a book not to be missed." |
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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.” |
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Body Politic is a diagnosis and antidote for the cancer of our times. “No one with a breath escapes.” These are poems of resistance and revival. |
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In Rich Murphy’s new collection, Americana, he maneuvers time and space to bring us to a new sense of being… With wit, mournful logic, and the shivery creation of a new literary world, Rich Murphy draws us inevitably to these poems in joyful celebrations of language and the human imagination. |
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Voyeur is a work of vision and virtuosity. Concerned with relationships, marriage, sex and power, the poetry is dense, rapid, dazzling, the voice commanding, and the speaker charismatic. |
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Mr. Murphy is a very careful craftsman in his work, a patient and testing intelligence, one of those writers who knows precisely what he wants his style to achieve. His poetry is quiet but packed, carefully wrought, not surrealistically wild, and its range not limited but deliberately narrow. It takes aim. |
Great Grandfather
Pudding House Press, 2007
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