Long Exposure: Poems

by Julia Anna Morrison

Long Exposure  follows a single mother in the years after her son’s birth as she struggles with postpartum depression and a painful separation from her child’s father. Forced to reckon with her own childhood experiences, including the death of her brother to an accidental overdose, the speaker examines, as if through a camera lens, memories videotaped together. The book explores familial grief, addiction, and mental illness through language both surreal and plain, domesticated and haunted. These poems ask what it means to be an artist and a mother, outside of female friendships and romantic relationships. The poems, experienced as part fever dream, part damaged video footage, exist in a darkly overgrown and hypnotic landscape. Ultimately, the book is a portrait of a speaker locating many selves from long ago, resurrecting what images she can from the recovered video footage of her personal archive.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published November 30, 2023

Reviews

[Heather DeBel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poems from Morrison. It’s both surreal and haunting, with poems about motherhood, love, and grief for the speaker’s brother. I especially loved the poems about the speaker’s relationship to her child’s father (though I’m always a sucker for stories of love and heartbreak).

[Loisa Fenichell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly phenomenal and original collection, with stunning imagery and similes, that made me tear up!

[Ryleigh Wann · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know when you dream, and things feel tangible, but not quite real? This collection feels like that—familiarity through a fog. I love when poetry does this. Following the thread in this collection was all leading to the last couplet, and I devoured these poems. They are stunning, and will be thinking about them for a long time.

[Hannah Bonner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most astonishing poetry collection I've ever read. You'll want to return to this one over and over.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Morrison’s poems is like discovering the shape and figure to duress. Like that feeling weighing on you from inside your body, the sensation described by every novel that refers to a chest tightening. With Morrison, this sensation of duress isn’t only about naming that feeling. It’s what you’re feeling inside your own house, you domestic space or your domestic situation, and it’s occupying your body. Where it exists with contour and figuration. Like how Deep Image poems were handling the duress expressed in the color and weight of a stone when you hold it in your hands. Morrison makes that sensation living in a home. Living through winter. Living with the weight of an emotional humidity all around your home. That is the feeling that will occupy your body living with these poems. Weight, and an atmosphere of weight drawing into a core.

Like sitting in your living room while the evening shadows darken. And you’re leaving the blinds where they were. How slow nightfall is. That feeling of darkness coming. And maybe I shouldn’t always be thinking about Deep Image poetry to talk about darkness (there are many poetic darknesses!), but it serves as a useful point of comparison. Because where the Deep Image will often concentrate the darkness, where the poem’s darkened tone feels sunk into the stone or whatever its central image is, the darkness in Morrison’s poems is more like mottled paper. Like the trees appearing in many of the poems, sometimes even specific trees that stand outside the window to her son’s bedroom, they are present as objects, but their existence in the poems is like a darkened coloring streaked or bled from the object itself. Like if you were holding a red rubber ball, and suddenly all that rubbery redness started bleeding down your fingers.

Now combine that darkened sensibility with Morrison’s biographical experiences, how this combination would touch each of the objects present in the poems. And read all of it into a domestic space. I’ve mentioned the significance of a home, and how concretely the home in Morrison’s poems exists. Build that home from sentences. A home that would require grammatical statements layering, and intersecting, so they feel like currents in a large of body of water pushing against and reacting to one another. Imagine the home immersed in these sentences. A dense combination of sensation and perspective. That inescapable sensation.

[Jennifer Stephens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Julia explores her trauma through verse. She's suffered from post partum depression, divorce, and other indignities. Haunting verse, sad, depressing, but insightful.

This was way more depressing than I normally enjoy, but still glad I read it. I shudder to imagine her child reading this one day given her poems about not wanting him and wanting to die.

[Catherine Pond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven’t read a book this unique and stunning in years. Poems like “Myths About Trees” and “Good Night’s Sleep” resonate so deeply. I can’t choose a favorite poem because they are each brilliant, imagistic. Like a film adjusting the frame, to let us closer and closer into the speaker’s grief.