Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

by John Murillo

John Murillo’s second book is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation. A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a mother battered by a father’s fists; a workout at an iron gym recalls a long-ago mentor who pushed the speaker “to become something unbreakable.” The presence of these and poetic forbears—Gil Scott-Heron, Yusef Komunyakaa—provide a context for strength in the face of danger and anger. At the heart of the book is a sonnet crown triggered by the shooting deaths of three Brooklyn men that becomes an extended meditation on the history of racial injustice and the notion of payback as a form of justice.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2020

About the author

John Murillo is the current Jay C.and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A graduate of New York University's MFA program in creative writing, he has also received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Cave Canem, and the New York Times. He is a two-time Larry Neal Writers' Award winner and the inaugural Elma P. Stuckey Visiting Emerging Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Callaloo, Court Green, Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, and the anthology Writing Self and Community: African-American Poetry After the Civil Rights Movement. UP JUMP THE BOOGIE is his first collection. (Amazon)

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books 2010) and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2020. He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College. Murillo lives in Brooklyn, New York. (Poets.org)

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry hooks the reader immediately with its opening poem "On Confessionalism," a tongue-scorching taste of Murillo's explosive narrative powers: "Not sleepwalking, but waking still, / with my hand on a gun, and the gun / in a mouth, and the mouth / on the face of a man on his knees...." Introducing the book's major themes of violence and masculinity, morality and luck, this poem rips back a curtain to reveal youth and old age to be a false binary, since an old man cannot disown the acts of his youth but must wait uneasily for their consequences to catch up to him: "Left the pistol in / a storm drain, but never got around / to wiping the prints."

This theme of guilt and innocence intertwined, victimhood and complicity indistinguishable, weaves throughout the book, reappearing in the poem "Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds," where a man decides against rescuing a trapped bird because it could be fatal for someone who looks like him in America to risk being mistaken for a car thief: "And, like any good god, I disappeared. Not / indifferent, exactly. But with things to do." The poem goes on to catalog other situations in which a choice had to be made between saving others and saving oneself, all memories that haunt the speaker years down the road. Agonized by the impossibility of correcting the wrongs of the past, the speaker of the poem "Dolores, Maybe" pivots with a poignantly childlike desperation to magical thinking: "A talisman I hold out to you now. // Please. Come closer. Take this from my hand."

Murillo has the savvy to see that, just as everyone has been hurt by somebody, everybody too is guilty of having hurt someone else: this is expressed with particular charm and relatability in the ekphrastic poem "After the Dance," inspired by the Ernie Barnes painting Sugar Shack, in which a woman jilts a gravedigger in order to flirt with a drummer, only to be jilted herself and left with nothing: "...and the gravedigger's disappeared with your pocketbook." (The gravedigger in this poem, of course, is no mere human suitor but also a personification of Death, who always wins in the end.) This cleareyed understanding of the cyclic interdependency of human relations is a leaven that makes the joy and love in poems like "On Negative Capability" and "Distant Lover" feel earned. Like yin and yang, bliss in Murillo's world is counterbalanced by menace: "the small town windows" in "Distant Lover" mirror the lover's desire back at him, but are also vaguely ominous and threatening, "watching [him] burn."

But the monsters "waiting / in the dark" are not the same for everybody, and Murillo is wise to this reality, too. This is apparent in the book's centerpiece, the morally complex sonnet crown "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn," which toes the line between breaking the rules of its chosen form and resolutely seeking a tragic beauty within the confines of those rules, using a perfectly regular iambic pentameter while its final binding sonnet responds to the requirements of a Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme via tense slant rhymes like fire and prayer, right and shoot, kin and throne (note how each of those rhyme-pairs uneasily yokes together a word that has harmonious/holy connotations -- prayer, right, kin -- and a word evoking violent power struggle -- fire, shoot, throne). The same wisdom gleams through in the irony-tanged title poem "Contemporary American Poetry," in which the speaker overhears a fellow poet gripe that "you have to be gay or / black or both to win anything / these days," at the same moment that the TV behind them is broadcasting "news of another boy / shot dead and black," followed by a segment about a "Yemeni woman...splashed with acid for loving who / she chooses." The poem ends with yet another imperative, yet another direct address to the reader: "Everybody, now, squeeze in / tight. Everybody, now, say cheese." It is necessary to "squeeze in" so that we are all included in an accounting of contemporary America and contemporary American poetry, but maybe also because co-existence is the only viable option.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murillo's strength lies in his range and in his talent for narrative poetry. The stories in the narrative pieces plumb the raw emotions of Murillo's past -- all with a voice equal parts informal and, at times, academic. Murillo "talks" to the reader, to contemporary poets, to poets gone to the great stanza in the sky. You read his book and begin to feel like you're at the bar listening. To a good talker, not a bore.

It's a free verse world, for the most part, but the middle section of the book is all "sonnets" -- and by that I mean the "modern" sonnet, which only requires 14 lines to merit the charge. Petrarch and Shakespeare need not apply.

Like most Black poets, Murillo gives life to the moment. Not only the moment, but the history. Here's an example of his work:

Variation on a Theme By Elizabeth Bishop

Start with loss. Lose everything. Then lose it all again.
Lose a good woman on a bad day. Find a better woman,
then lose five friends chasing her. Learn to lose as if
your life depended on it. Learn that your life depends on it.
Learn it like karate, like riding a bike. Learn it, master it.
Lose money, lose time, lose your natural mind.
Get left behind, then learn to leave others. Lose and
lose again. Measure a father's coffin against a cousin's
crashing T-cells. Kiss your sister through prison glass.
Know why your woman's not answering her phone.
Lose sleep. Lose religion. Lose your wallet in El Segundo.
Open your window. Listen: the last slow notes
of a Donny Hathaway song. A child crying. Listen:
a drunk man is cussing out the moon. He sounds like
your dead uncle, who, before he left, lost a leg
to sugar. Shame. Learn what's given can be taken;
what can be taken, will. This you can bet on without
losing. Sure as nightfall and an empty bed. Lose
and lose again. Lose until it's second nature. Losing
farther, losing faster. Lean out your open window, listen:
the child is laughing now. No, it's the drunk man again
in the street, losing his voice, suffering each invisible star.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful!

It’s as if a bunch of intelligent people chose to write poetry thru Murillo’s muses.

"I'm not supposed to. But I want a brick,
a window. One good match, to watch it bloom."

“[…] And, like any good god, I disappeared. Not
indifferent, exactly. But with things to do. […]”

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Murillo is a true poet's poet, bringing forward work that is profoundly metaphorical, deeply personal, imbued with universal truths, and which is always, blessedly, and most rare in the poetry of our times, actually ABOUT something. The way he engages with himself, with history, with the world, and most of all, with the reader, makes for a wholly unique reading experience that extends far past the written page. Check out this masterpiece, and do yourself a favor and buy this book:

Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds

I think first of two sparrows I met when walking home,
late night years ago, in another city, not unlike this — the one

bird frantic, attacking I thought, the way she swooped
down, circled my head, and flailed her wings in my face;

how she seemed to scream each time I swung; how she
dashed back and forth between me and a blood-red Corolla

parked near the opposite curb; how, finally, I understood:
I spied another bird, also calling, its foot inexplicably

caught in the car’s closed door, beating its whole bird
body against it. Trying, it appeared, to bang himself free.

And who knows how long he’d been there, wailing. Who
knows — he and the other I mistook, at first, for a bat.

They called to me — something between squawk and chirp,
something between song and prayer — to do something,

anything. And, like any good god, I disappeared. Not
indifferent, exactly. But with things to do. And, most likely,

on my way home from another heartbreak. Call it 1997,
and say I’m several thousand miles from home. By which

I mean those were the days I made of everyone a love song.
By which I mean I was lonely and unrequited. But that’s

not quite it either. Truth is, I did manage to find a few
to love me, but couldn’t always love them back. The Rasta

law professor. The firefighter’s wife. The burlesque dancer
whose daughter blackened drawings with ms to mean

the sky was full of birds the day her daddy died. I think
his widow said he drowned one morning on a fishing trip.

Anyway, I’m digressing. But if you asked that night — 
did I mention it was night? — why I didn’t even try

to jimmy the lock to spring the sparrow, I couldn’t say,
truthfully, that it had anything to do with envy, with wanting

a woman to plead as deeply for me as these sparrows did,
one for the other. No. I’d have said something, instead,

about the neighborhood itself, the car thief shot a block
and a half east the week before. Or about the men

I came across nights prior, sweat-slicked and shirtless,
grappling in the middle of the street, the larger one’s chest

pressed to the back of the smaller, bruised and bleeding
both. I know you thought this was about birds,

but stay with me. I left them both in the street — 
the same street where I’d leave the sparrows — the men

embracing and, for all one knows (especially one not
from around there), they could have been lovers — 

the one whispering an old, old tune into the ear
of the other — Baby, baby, don’t leave me this way. I left

the men where I’d leave the sparrows and their song.
And as I walked away, I heard one of the men call to me,

please or help or brother or some such. And I didn’t break
stride, not one bit. It’s how I’ve learned to save myself.

Let me try this another way. Call it 1977. And say
I’m back west, South Central Los Angeles. My mother

and father at it again. But this time in the street,
broad daylight, and all the neighbors watching. One,

I think his name was Sonny, runs out from his duplex
to pull my father off. You see where I’m going with this?

My mother crying out, fragile as a sparrow. Sonny
fighting my father, fragile as a sparrow. And me,

years later, trying to get it all down. As much for you — 
I’m saying — as for me. Sonny catches a left, lies flat

on his back, blood starting to pool and his own
wife wailing. My mother wailing, and traffic backed,

now, half a block. Horns, whistles, and soon sirens.
1977. Summer. And all the trees full of birds. Hundreds,

I swear. And since I’m the one writing it, I’ll tell you
they were crying. Which brings me back to Dolphy

and his transcribing. The jazzman, I think, wanted only
to get it down pure. To get it down exact — the animal

racking itself against a car’s steel door, the animals
in the trees reporting, the animals we make of ourselves

and one another. Stay with me now. Don’t leave me.
Days after the dustup, my parents took me to the park.

And in this park was a pond, and in this pond were birds.
Not sparrows, but swans. And my father spread a blanket

and brought from a basket some apples and a paring knife.
Summertime. My mother wore sunglasses. And long sleeves.

My father, now sober, cursed himself for leaving the radio.
But my mother forgave him, and said, as she caressed

the back of his hand, that we could just listen to the swans.
And we listened. And I watched. Two birds coupling,

one beating its wings as it mounted the other. Summer,
1977. I listened. And watched. When my parents made love

late into that night, I covered my ears in the next room,
scanning the encyclopedia for swans. It meant nothing to me — 

then, at least — but did you know the collective noun
for swans is a lamentation? And is a lamentation not

its own species of song? What a woman wails, punch drunk
in the street? Or what a widow might sing, learning her man

was drowned by swans? A lamentation of them? Imagine
the capsized boat, the panicked man, struck about the eyes,

nose, and mouth each time he comes up for air. Imagine
the birds coasting away and the waters suddenly calm.

Either trumpet swans or mutes. The dead man’s wife
running for help, crying to any who’d listen. A lamentation.

And a city busy saving itself. I’m digressing, sure. But
did you know that to digress means to stray from the flock?

When I left my parents’ house, I never looked back. By which
I mean I made like a god and disappeared. As when I left

the sparrows. And the copulating swans. As when someday
I’ll leave this city. Its every flailing, its every animal song.

[River · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highlights are the Eric Dolphy bird poem, which always makes me want to cry, and A Refusal to Mourn, which is a masterclass itself on sonnets and poetry in general

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important collection examining the intersection of two very different aspects of the poet's life.

Some of my favorite lines:

Day nobody died, so why not Hallelujah?

I know you thought this was about birds, but stay with me.

Maybe memory is all the home you get.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murillo fuses the formal and vernacular better than almost anyone. The words are well chosen and his precision has momentum. An instant classic like his last one.

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy hell, what a brilliant & beautiful collection of poems.

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't decide which version I like more:

Maybe memory is all the home / you get.

OR

Maybe memory is all the home / you get. And rage . . .

(from "Mercy, Mercy Me")

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murillo's words are so clean, so meticulously chosen and complied, and so evocative. He doesn't waste times on complex words when simple ones have a punchier effect, which is one of my favorite qualities in a poet. The way he writes of memory and the past -- simultaneously sweet and dangerous and always lurking in the back of the mind -- is universally applicable, even when the memories he recounts are quite specific to his own experience. I love the way he takes a single evocative image and constructs a scene or scene around it, and lets the scene convey meaning by itself without imposing too much navel-gazing on top of it. "Dear Yusef," is one such example: even its epistolary nature adds such weight to it using a relatively simple mechanic; "Contemporary American Poetry", especially following the gut-punch second act poem, was similarly affecting. All the complexity that makes this collection so interesting comes from its very intentional layers of meaning, not from anything superficial laid on top. This was a short collection that did feel a little light (the poems themselves are weighty and obviously worthwhile, but I got to the end first expecting and then wishing that there would be more), but I appreciated the structure nonetheless alongside everything else there is to like about it. 4/5

[Glenda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve had this collection since March 27, 2020 and only this week returned to it. I’m glad I did because it’s fantastic. I particularly love the sonnets in part II and the way Murillo writes about the angst of being a poet awaiting prize announcements and watching others win. This collection deserves lots of accolades. I think the poems would appeal to teens, too, which is one of my goals in choosing collections. Favorite poem: “Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop.” The collection offers opportunity for teachers to spark inspiration from lots of poets, including those in the canon. High praise I should have given sooner.

[mckenna⭐️]

forgot i read this for my class
idk how to rate poetry books sry

[Frederick Gault · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply moving collection informed by the evil heart of racism. Connects you with the despair, rage and broken dreams of America.

[David Abrams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the 100th book I read this year. It is so good, so powerful, so important, I could read these poems another hundred times each.

Highly recommended!

[Cedric · Rating 4 out of 5]

The longer narrative pieces tend to be my favorites in this excellent collection-Murillo is a gifted storyteller. In "Upon Reading that Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds," Murillo recalls his parents' tumultuous relationship:

Let me try this another way. Call it 1977. And say
I’m back west, South Central Los Angeles. My mother

and father at it again. But this time in the street,
broad daylight, and all the neighbors watching. One,

I think his name was Sonny, runs out from his duplex
to pull my father off. You see where I’m going with this?

My mother crying out, fragile as a sparrow. Sonny
fighting my father, fragile as a sparrow. And me,

years later, trying to get it all down. As much for you — 
I’m saying — as for me. Sonny catches a left, lies flat

on his back, blood starting to pool and his own
wife wailing. My mother wailing, and traffic backed,

now, half a block. Horns, whistles, and soon sirens.
1977. Summer. And all the trees full of birds. Hundreds,

I swear. And since I’m the one writing it, I’ll tell you
they were crying. Which brings me back to Dolphy

and his transcribing. The jazzman, I think, wanted only
to get it down pure. To get it down exact — the animal

racking itself against a car’s steel door, the animals
in the trees reporting, the animals we make of ourselves

and one another. Stay with me now. Don’t leave me.
Days after the dustup, my parents took me to the park.

And in this park was a pond, and in this pond were birds.
Not sparrows, but swans. And my father spread a blanket

and brought from a basket some apples and a paring knife.
Summertime. My mother wore sunglasses. And long sleeves.

My father, now sober, cursed himself for leaving the radio.
But my mother forgave him, and said, as she caressed

the back of his hand, that we could just listen to the swans.
And we listened. And I watched. Two birds coupling,

one beating its wings as it mounted the other. Summer,
1977. I listened. And watched. When my parents made love

late into that night, I covered my ears in the next room,
scanning the encyclopedia for swans. It meant nothing to me — 

then, at least — but did you know the collective noun
for swans is a lamentation? And is a lamentation not

its own species of song? What a woman wails, punch drunk
in the street? Or what a widow might sing, learning her man

was drowned by swans? A lamentation of them?
...

"A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn" is a spectacular crown of sonnets that attempts to contextualize why many people in communities of color might have been less inclined to lament the brutal murders of two Brooklyn policemen in 2014. Recalling Dylan Thomas' "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Fire, of a Child in London" in its title, each sonnet begins with a epigraph from black male poets, several of which lament the condition of Blacks in America and directly or implicitly critique the extent to which most of White America seems to demand undue affection for the country given those conditions. One of these is borrowed from Bob Kaufman: "America, I forgive you...I forgive you eating black children." Just ahead of the Kaufman line, the gunman concedes in his anger that he wants revenge for the deaths of unarmed black men:

To breathe it in, this boulevard perfume
of beauty shops and roti shacks, to take
in all its funk, calypso, reggaeton,
and soul, to watch school kids and elders go
about their days, their living, is, if not
to fall in love, at least to wonder why
some want us dead. Again this week, they killed
another child who looked like me. A child
we’ll march about, who’ll grace our placards, say,
then be forgotten like a trampled pamphlet. What
I want, I’m not supposed to. Payback. Woe
and plenty trouble for the gunman’s clan.
I’m not suppose to. But I want a brick,
a window. One good match, to watch it bloom.

While it doesn't eclipse the technical accomplishment of "A Refusal...," "Confessionalism" is, for me, a gem amongst gems. Murillo starts this poem (and this collection) off with a speaker who has a gun in another man's mouth, instantly riveting you to the page. He then proceeds to build on the tension by giving us the backstory before his speaker comes to resolution.

...
Autumn of ’89, and I’m standing
in a section 8 apartment parking lot,
pistol cocked, and staring down
at this man, then up into the mug
of an old woman staring, watering
the single sad flower to the left
of her stoop, the flower also staring,
my engine idling behind me, a slow
moaning bassline and the bark
of a dead rapper nudging me on.
All to say, someone’s brokenhearted.
And this man with the gun in his mouth—
this man who, like me, is really little
more than a boy—may or may not
have something to do with it.
May or may not have said a thing
or two, betrayed a secret, say,
that walked my love away. And why
not say it: She adored me. And I,
her...

For me, "Confessionalism" is rivaled only by the title piece "Contemporary American Poetry," which features a scene that will be somewhat familiar to anyone who's shared dinner or a few drinks with fellow poets. "Po-biz" gossip consisting of complaints about who won this or that award and who had doors opened thanks to who they know is par for the course; Murillo chides us (er, them) for their myopic pettiness by spilling a spot of wry tea in his comrades' general direction:

...halfway down
the tale, you hear one poet
congratulate a second on some prize
or another while a third sulks,
sips his gimlet and pretends not
to listen, and a fourt mumbles
something about not being notified
his application was even received
and how you have to be gay or
black or both to win anything
these days...
and on the television
...
an anchorwoman's mouthing
the muted news of another boy
shot dead and black in some city
now burning and the police chief
promises a thorough investigation
and a Yemeni woman is burning,
splashed with acid for loving who
she chooses, and everywhere,
you think, is burning, burning
...Everybody, now, squeeze in
tight. Everybody now, say cheese.

It's funny (and sobering) because it's true-and you should pick up this collection because it's brilliant. It's garnered attention for several awards and I'd wager it'll rake a few in.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every part of "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn" stopped me with its way of opening up the body of our us (our history). Incriminating and afire. I couldn't get up. I didn't mean to read the whole thing in one sitting. (And then, how the meter made the argument! in "On Prosody.")

Thank you, Jon Sands for the recommendation.

[Richard Sanford · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most breathtaking collections I've read in recent memory. Lines that froze my blood, dazzling virtuosity, and as clear a statement of our time as I can imagine. This book devastated me.

[Astro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m sorry, the poems about police brutality?? And rioting?? Are just so good??? I want to scream
Every time I read them, this is genuinely one of my favorite poetry books so I definitely recommend

[Ron Mohring · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book just sat me down and smacked my brain. My heart. My head nodding, my mouth open. SO freaking good.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

EVEN BETTER THAN his first book (Up Jumped the Boogie). This one too deals often with the rougher precincts of urban life in street-inflected language, but at the same time shows extraordinary formal control and familiarity with the traditions of English verse.

This book includes the poem (or poems) that got my attention in the 2020 Best American Poetry, "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn." The title is a tip of the hat to Dylan Thomas, which is nice, but the astonishing thing is that Murillo pulls off a crown of sonnets, moreover a heroic crown of sonnets, while digging down into one of the most painful and urgent problems of our time and place, state violence against the Black community.

The volume also includes "On Confessionalism" and "Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Kinds of Birds,"likewise published in the BAP series (2019 and 2017, respectively). Both show how skillful Murillo is at taking an idea for a walk into some surprising places, a more compressed David Antin.

The penultimate poem, "On Prosody" manages to encompass Emerson and Frost while telling a terrible but all too credible story of how things were in Murillo's childhood neighborhood, and then ends with a sonnet that is a re-mix of a Notorious B.I.G. lyric but also a sort of apologia pro vita sua.

How does he do it?

I also find myself also wondering...how old is he? Gray in the beard, so past 45, I guess, making it a surprise that Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is only his second book. There is not a dud poem in here, however, so maybe it's just a question of quality control.

[K.K. Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"My engine idling behind me, a slow / moaning baseline and the bark / of a dead rapper nudging me on."

"My father, / lymph node masses fading from / his x-rays, said surviving one thing / means another comes and kills you."

"Learn to lose as if / your life depended on it. Learn that your life depends on it."

"Maybe memory is all the home/ you get. And rage, where you / first learn how fragile the axis / upon which everything tilts."

"You've heard this one before. / In which there's blood. In which a black man snaps. / In which things burn. You buy your matches. Christ / is watching from the wall art, swathed in fire."

"A mother kneels and prays -- / Not peace, but pipe bombs, hands to light the fuse."

"It's natural, no, to put your faith in fire? / The way it makes new all it touches."

"If loneliness, Lady, / is an old world city, tonight you're set to be mayor."

"Besides, he never was one / to put much stock in visions. Voodoo, he'd say. / You want to help me, help me hit the numbers, he'd say."

"Something, Frost says, doesn't love a wall. / But something too, goddammit, wishes walls / within the walls and more walls after that."

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about identity, race in America, survival, family, violence, and hope.

from On Confessionalism: "My father, / lymph node masses fading from / his x-rays, said surviving one thing / means another comes and kills you. / He's dead, and so, I trust him."

from Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop: "Listen: / a drunk man is cussing out the moon. He sounds like / your dead uncle, who, before he left, lost a leg / to sugar. Shame. Learn what's given can be taken; / what can be taken, will. This is can bet on without / losing."

from A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn: "They said don't move, they said / get down, they said to walk back toward their car. / He, so to speak, got down... Three to the head, / six to the heart. A mother kneels and prays— / Not peace, but pipe bombs, hands to light the fuse."

[Camille Dungy]

Sometimes, in the midst of one of his intense, politically charged, compelling narratives, John Murillo stops. Not to smell the roses. That would be too simple, too expected, and there is nothing simple or easy to anticipate in Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. But there are birds sometimes, swooping down in a way that cannot be ignored. Swarming off a page scrawled in grief. And there are broken-necked flowers and well-tended ones, too. Beauty and hurt Murillo carries into his poems, like flowers meant for a lover. Or for a grave.

Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/2022/02/twe...

[Minnow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy Murillo's style a lot. Simple words, chock-full of cultural references, direct and full of depth if you look further. This is a short collection that delivers a solid punch, and all poems are beautifully connected and in conversation with each other. I would've liked to see certain themes developed further, but for what it is, its great.

[George Abraham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the best book of poetry I've read this year, thus far. This collection changed a lot for me, in terms of how I see poetry accessing memory, and (de)constructing imaginations & consciousnesses. Nothing short of groundbreaking - this book is in my personal canon forever.

[Betty F · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the experience of reading and discussing books in book club and having John join us was amazing. The way he broke down the time it took to write a poem and we just talked about themes of loss, truth, masculinity. So good.

[Mallory Rodenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

With poetry collections, I usually read through fast then go back and study the poems I like most. With this book, I studied every poem as I went, from the first page to the last. The way the content and form work together to make these gripping, intense poems is just astonishing. A perfect book.

[Madeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Murillo is a poet like few others. His voice streams off the page and into your mind like television for your brain and a gut punch to keep you alive. Read his work, and find something between song and prayer, but better.

[S꩜phie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the first two poems ("On confessionalism" and "variation on a theme by Elizabeth bishop") in class and then went to his reading and was very impressed, was a little less impressed by the collection as a whole but still really well done.

[Cheri Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. John Murillo’s work draws me into centuries-old traditions of great poetry and at the same time, it's utterly distinct and original—reading it is like being in the middle of the most beautiful and terrible storm.