Overview

Red, White, and Blues is the fourth installment of a large, ongoing project acclaimed artist Matthew Shipp describes as ""a kaleidoscopic, deep, and opulent journey."" Once more, Sean Murphy explores America and its mythology through poems that function as biography, history, and cultural commentary. Where earlier collections focused primarily on jazz and blues musicians, this volume turns its attention toward politics and the figures who have shaped-and distorted-our shared cultural imagination. A moral cross-examination spanning history, war, religion, and pop spectacle, the collection asks what we worship, what we excuse, and what the stories we tell do to us. Deconstructing figures such as Ronald Reagan, Roy Cohn, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, the poems dissect the ideologies and decisions that have impacted countless lives. Fractious events-including George Custer's massacre of Native Americans, the police beating of Rodney King, and Rudy Giuliani's crackdown on the homeless in New York City-are remixed with nuance and urgency. Fictional legends inspired by real figures, including Willy Loman and Gordon Gekko, appear alongside scenes from films such as Apocalypse Now, Wall Street, and Blade Runner, exposing how certain worldviews not only reflect history, but actively shape it.

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9780989880572

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Reviews

""A trickster collection, perfect for our demented times, sly, honest, impossible to cage and yet absolutely liberating."" -Junot Diaz, author of This is How You Lose Her ""A dope set of poems I trust will find their way into readers' hearts and minds and be useful to their transformation."" -Danez Smith, author of Don't Call Us Dead ""Sean Murphy's verse is, in the best American tradition, a jeremiad that poetically holds us to the highest of our convictions while interrogating where we've failed. In that regard, it's also a manifesto in verse, looking not just to the past, but to the possibilities of a future embodying our highest ideals."" -Ed Simon, author of American Elegy, founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books ""The poems in Red, White, and Blues are like espresso shots to the brain. Each jolts the reader into fresh considerations of the people--both real and fictional--who have shaped American culture and history. Together, they celebrate, interrogate, mourn, rage, and sing. In other words, they distill the complicated madness of being American today."" -Matthew Davis, author of A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore ""Red, White, and Blues is a must-read for anyone who feels bewildered and outraged by our atomizing contemporary moment. These poems are a revelation, moving between distant and recent history with a cast of characters that includes everyone from Captain Cook and King Leopold to Roy Cohn and Richard Nixon--not to mention our present-day miscreants. A reckoning delivered at exactly the moment we need it."" -Timothy Denevi, author of Freak Kingdom and Hyper ""Our citizens die in the streets while our leaders start wars in countries they can't pronounce. In Red, White, and Blues, Sean Murphy confronts our nation of contradictions-one that also gave the world B.B. King and Billie Holiday-and asks that we neither look away nor despair. This is the power of the artist-citizen."" -Mark Katz, author of Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music

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