Overview

Murphy takes you on a journey through the cosmos, an intergalactic dad asking philosophical questions to ponder, but the fire is in moments of eclipse where the ""I"" is examined through a microscope, and the speaker is ""tided / into the fog,"" admitting blindness. New Jersey references to zombie-like traffic jams and Atlantic City Boardwalk realizations underscore the harsh realities that this collection welcomes into its universe with naked introspection. Shoreline floods are connected to both Galileo's visions and myopia, and when contemplating dust, the use of second person doesn't hide the speaker's own fear of ""an ego so fierce, it sucks you / into its own black hole."" The ""Bad History"" that spurred many of these works, from butchering times to no less gruesome Insta influencer moments, ends with a star wish to ""be somebody."" Murphy is clearly still immersed in flames and invites us to share in the warmth, and the burn. -Grisel Y. Acosta

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9781947896840

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Reviews

The poems in Peter Murphy's new collection make us wise. Like us, he is worn from traveling as he swirls across the Atlantic from Wales. Unlike us, he is a comet of consciousness which his latest trail of words sets ablaze. These poems made me feel blessed to have read them and have a very real chance of being passed down from generation to generation. -Joel Dias-Porter, Ideas of Improvisation I took a teenaged niece to an organ recital once, and her reaction afterward was, ""It was so sad!"" Maybe, I said, but wasn't it just so damned beautiful as well? I think it was Picasso, though it might have been Peter Murphy, who said that art is the lie that makes us realize the truth. That's what happens in this wonderful book: sure, the carnival season is ending, as one poem says, but if we don't want that to happen, all we have to do is lie and say, it's still going on, the Ferris wheel's still spinning, the midway still crammed with booths selling sausage dogs, cotton candy, fried pickles. And isn't that lie lovelier than the thing itself? ""Grief and relief / rhyme,"" says another poem, and if there's grief aplenty here, there's a hundred times as much grace, as much elegance, as much unflagging splendor. -David Kirby, The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983-2023

Author Information

Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York City. He is the author of a dozen previous books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, including A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, New Welsh Reader, North American Review, The Sun, and elsewhere. His honors include six fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and residencies at Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Millay Colony. He has been a consultant to the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and numerous school districts around the country. In addition, he has been an educational advisor to three PBS television programs on poetry produced by Bill Moyers. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City.

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