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With speakers set adrift in mysterious settings—a motel in the middle of a white-sand desert, a house haunted by the ghost of a dead writer, an abandoned settlement high in the mountains, a city that might give way to riotous forest—Black Observatory upends the world we think we know. Here, an accident with a squirrel proves the least bizarre moment of a day that is ordinary in outline only. The future is revealed in a list of odd crimes-to-be. And in a field of grasses, a narrator loses himself in a past and present “human conflagration / of desire and doubt,” the “path to a field of unraveling.”
Unraveling lies at the heart of these poems. Murray picks at the frayed edges of everyday life, spinning new threads and weaving an uncanny and at times unnerving tapestry in its place. He arranges and rearranges images until the mundane becomes distorted: a cloud “stretches and coils and becomes an intestine / embracing the anxious protagonist,” thoughts “leap from sagebrush / like jackrabbits into your high beams,” a hot black coffee tastes “like runoff from a glacier.” In the process, our world emerges in surprising, disquieting relief.
Simultaneously comic and tragic, playful and deeply serious, Black Observatory is a singular debut collection, a portrait of reality in penumbra.
A New York Public Library 2023 Best Book for Adults
“In this playful and haunting debut, Murray turns his gaze toward the ordinariness and expansiveness of human life…The observational and sympathetic power of these searching poems makes them hard to forget.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“[Black Observatory’s] strikingly surreal imagery fashions situations that are by turns ridiculous and terrifying. [. . .]This collection is edgy fun for fans of such surrealist poets as Edward Lear and Caroline Bird.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review
“With these fantastical scenes, streams-of-consciousness, and absurdist associations, these poems encourage readers to process the complexity of emotion, experience, and the human condition. [Black Observatory showcases] Murray’s ability to seamlessly move into worlds where readers may find themselves unable to unravel the real from the imagined.”—The West Review
“This collection contains revelations, warnings, reflections, and, of course, observations that make the reader feel a little less alone in uncertainty and less afraid while still being afraid.”—Eric Aldrich, FullStop
“Just as myths work to explain why things work the way they do, Murray’s numinous work shows us that poems offer us the same power: a path to follow that becomes a cosmological roadmap for any to investigate the mysteries of human traditions, cultural traits, and religious or supernatural beliefs. Black Observatory is a tremendous reflection of the world and of us, in all our complexity.” —Mikal Wix, West Trade Review
“Its very strangeness, its eccentric lenses on cis masculinity, and its simple, formal elegance called me to Black Observatory. Reading these poems is like embarking on a Twilight Zone episode where Franz Kafka bumps into Salvador Dalí in a hardware store, and dark, absurdist adventures ensue; where ‘Crimes of the Future’ involve ‘Quitting a job everyone agrees you should keep’ and ‘Kissing a foreigner in a time of war.’ There’s sweetness here, too, and deep thought and feeling—this is a singular debut by a singular sensibility: no one else sounds like Murray.”—Dana Levin
CONTENTS ONE
A Welsh Scythe 3
Letter to Knut 5
Spartan Gavotte The Ghost Writer 8
Hallucinated Landscapes 10
Get Segovia 13
Endless Dictations 15
An Encounter 16
TWO
Crimes of the Future 21
Merriweather 23
The White Sands Motel 25
A History of Clouds 28
The Squirrel That I Killed 30
The Haunted Coppice 31
My Time with Speece 33
Field 35
6
THREE
The New American Painters 39
The Invisible Forest 41
Without Winston 43
W. S. Merwin 44
Abandoned Settlement 46
The Wayward Brother 49
Duke & Pam 51
Homecoming 52
FOUR
Once, Long Ago, in a Poem 57
Salvaged Travelogue 58
Black Observatory 60
Meyer Lost an Eye 61
From a Letter 63
Remnant Showroom 65
Poem for X 69
Jaunt to Vermilion 70
Acknowledgments 71