JUNE!

PRAISE FOR JUNE!

“So much has happened in the United States over the last decade, so much grieving and violence continues to happen, that time itself feels flattened or distorted. Through two long poems whose patient accumulation of details allows the contemporary, the historical, and the personal to collide, Miguel Murphy’s JUNE! is bracing and tender. These poems wander into the interior, crossing borders of space and time. “Season” chronicles a mind drifting through an uncertain year. The tight, vertiginous lines lead to electrifying juxtapositions. From Sappho to Schubert to illness to hard pricks to reality television to birdsong on a hiking trail, nothing is beneath Murphy’s attention. The companion poem “June” is incantatory and incendiary. Clear-eyed about the self and this tumultuous, political moment, the poem confronts: ‘The poverty / Of free affection, whole neighborhoods / Disappointing each other, dreamless / In America.’ The fury foregrounded throughout is made palpable through the clarity and musicality of its language. These poems offer no easy consolations, and do instead the the more daring and honest work of articulating vexed, ambivalent feelings: rage, exhaustion, playfulness, despair, and hope. These are poems I’ll return to for all my seasons to come.

— Derrick Austin, author of This Elegance

“There comes a point in a poet’s career when a fully achieved style turns against itself, enabling an unleashing that, in its abjuration of style, becomes the height of style—like Prospero breaking his staff and drowning his book of spells after a lifetime of magic, or Beethoven composing into deafness. Headlong and controlled, breathless yet reined in, JUNE! is a ‘hymn of angry vulnerability,’ ‘furious, / exhausted, enraged, overwhelmed,’ moving by careful confrontation and oblique attack through ICE raids and BLM marches—’I’m walking / Because I don’t know what else I can do’—through the manipulations of algorithmic entertainment and the infinite scroll of reposted atrocity—’here’s / Your summer Blockbuster like a beachside / Gaza’—through the AIDS epidemic and the COVID pandemic—’A decade, / no epitaph. / Two, without / cure’—to track how a life lived inside poetry becomes abstracted by the very words available to describe it, until ‘one / doesn’t even exist.’ Against this erosion, Miguel Murphy wields the dignity of private grief—the loss of a beloved dog, the memory of a grandfather—and the defiance of self-annihilation, ‘useless / as these pages, clenched in my fist.’ Staring down our American nightmare, this is a poet who refuses to dream.”

— Armen Davoudian, author of The Palace of Forty Pillars

“The nimble and arresting poems of Miguel Murphy turn and turn, brilliantly amalgamating their luminous sources from life and literature. They search for meaning in history and culture, accruing wisdom and feeling, eschewing easy answers and pious consolations. ‘I went with / longing,’ the speaker writes, ‘An / impossible / desert / mountain, desolate, / gorgeous…’ In his brilliant chapbook, JUNE!, autobiography rises to art, and the texts that build a self breathe again with vitality and force.”

— Richie Hofmann, author of The Bronze Arms