Poetry
“Rich Murphy’s remarkable ability not only aligns ideas but transform them into something entirely new and profound. For this, we have given him a new title: “The Alchemist Syzygyan.” Just as a syzygy aligns celestial bodies, Murphy’s poems align disparate ideas, and just as an alchemist transmutes base metals into gold, they transmute these alignments into intellectual gold.” -- Emeniano Acain Somoza, Jr., Editor of Syzygy Poetry Journal, Philippines |
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Rich Murphy's Mind of Europe examines the fragments and fissures of modern civilization, visibilizing existential dilemmas amidst the remorseless march of machinations of progress. These poems are haunted by cracks in human authenticity, power, and what has become our dilettante-like quest for truth, in a world replete with egregious distractions. Drawing on Heideggerian, Baudrillardian, Freudian, and Eliotesque lines of poetical inquiry, Mind of Europe contemplates how technological advancements and societal shifts disrupt our shared ancient connections to place and self. From critiquing society’s pivot from community to commodity fetishism, to tracing the arcs from Enlightenment ideals to dystopian malaise, to painting chilling totalitarian spacetimes, this is a poetic manifesto for the silent majority among us that is still wondering where we come from and where we are inevitably bound. The monsters that rear their heads when modernity goes unchecked, the apocalyptic landscapes that have become a part of our daily experiences--ruins of knowledge, empire, human achievement, and the precipices of annihilation!
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Each poem is a clean, confident vector of thought from start to finish. Rich Murphy distills associational webs of thought into seamless, purposeful poetic machines - the craft of a master.
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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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These words, phrases, half-lines, lines, and stanzas do not belong together, yet here they are, forced into brilliant cohabitation, overloading circuits, sparking in great arcs, and melting the plastic world of poetry into a new form. These poems read like a trip to an impossible future misremembered, keeping you on edge like a spooked cat whose tail will not defluff. Volume up. Expand to full screen.
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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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“The ideas offered in Americana are hardly new (in fact they are depressingly omni-present), but Americana offers a unique treatment of these ideas; Murphy holds a mirror so close to the American face that the surface becomes a strange, new terrain, too close for familiarity. If there is fault, it is in excess, an overabundance, perhaps the final irony, especially for millenials, impossible to shock: perhaps Murphy’s point is therein proven all the more.” -- Erin O’Neill Armendarez, Editor Aji Magazine
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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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