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A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
The poems in Ben Murray’ s debut collection, What We’ re Left With, reflect on disconnection as a feature of contemporary urban experience. Murray’ s poems tackle themes of isolation, loneliness and human separation from nature. Murray creates trademark images of surprising loneliness and suburban angst: sog-white mornings/ of caffeinated mouths/ mating Cheerios/ O to empty O. The poet longs for mall-free days of sprawling languid under a pre-cancerous sun when we hurry up/ and wait, to become men. Writing about climate change, the poet asks how long until hibernating bears/ shake November from their sleep-under fur/ and start snorting around for off-season/ bargains. Capable of many different registers, Murray writes, in assumed voices, of grief and memory beyond his own immediate experience, something he describes as tapping into some larger collective autobiography.
“Murray illustrates the validity of more than his own perspective, and draws us in with his exploration of stark and sometimes painful elements of this existence we seem hell bent on moving through at breakneck speed.”
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96 Pages
June 01, 2010
9781926972848
eng