Mean Time

by Peter E. Murphy

“Listen, I’m full of contradictions,” the speaker in Peter Murphy’s new chapbook confides, but any reader of Murphy’s work already knows that his poems are full of strange truths, deep emotions, and abundant wonder. In Mean Time, the poet takes us on a journey from fantastic myths of self-invention that meld sly, sideways wit, insight and foreboding to urgent investigations and critiques of our current all-too-real reality. It is impossible to say which landscape, which assertion or image, leaves us more mystified and bereft. While time in Mean Time is taken through all its permutations, what is revealed is both timely and timeless. - Kathleen Graber

32 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York where he managed a night club, operated heavy equipment and drove a taxi. He has been awarded six creative writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, which might be a record, as well as multiple residencies at Yaddo, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Millay Colony and other artist retreats. He has published a dozen books and chapbooks of nonfiction and poetry including A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption, now out from Toplight Books.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This latest chapbook from Peter E. Murphy delivers a powerful disappointment with the world...or at least, disappointment at what we’re currently doing with it. Through a series of invented selves, Murphy explores marriage, schooling, racism, hate, and all the other ways we find to screw ourselves up. If Murphy himself ever peeks through, he is the subject line of a spam email, or a teacher dismayed by the potential of his students to graduate to incarceration rather than a degree. And he does what is maybe possible only in poetry: the shudder of our lives encased with a matter of syllables, like in the ending of “Closing Time”:

Everyone suffers, my friends,
and most of us suffer more than others as we lumber
down the Boardwalk from Pampers to Depends,
mewling and puking and leaking at both ends.