Episode 133: Delicious Disorientation 

Three poems by Christopher Brean Murray cleverly dropped us all into a wonderful sense of disorientation that we relished navigating. Our discussion touched on time travel, dreamscapes, masterful language and wordplay, and we explored the importance of trusting the speaker in poetry that leans into surrealism. Samantha pointed us to other texts that play with time, perception, and reality, and we spent a little time considering accessibility in poetry. Doom scrolling, misinformation, and disinformation all make appearances in conjured landscapes that brought pointillism to mind. Jason reminds us of the risk of expecting more of the same from a poet when as a reader you’ve fallen hard for an earlier work. It was hard to end our discussion as it was so rich and rewarding. After enthusiastically voting “yes” for the first two poems, we ended on a cliffhanger with the third. (Update: the third poem was ultimately a “no” for us, but the discussion will show how much we appreciated it.) 

Links you might like: 

Tobias Wolff "Bullet in the Brain" 

Tracy Chevalier, "The Glassmaker"  

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Lisa Zerkle, Divina Boko, Jess Fielo (sound engineer) 

Christopher Brean Murray’s book, Black Observatory (Milkweed Editions), was chosen by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2022 Jake Adam York Prize and was listed by The New York Public Library as one of the Best Books of 2023. Murray served as online poetry editor of Gulf Coast, and his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, and other journals. He lives in Houston, TX.