Marissa Ahmadkhani
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“I came to a field / of grasses I couldn’t name,” Christopher Brean Murray writes. His debut collection of poems, Black Observatory—the most recent winner of Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions’ Jake Adam York Prize—is set to come out in February of 2023. This book explores the unfolding of the imagined through the everyday and touches on a range of subjects, including the passage of time, cultural shifts, war, history, death, and the supernatural. Although these poems often begin with the quotidian—a tangible image or a relatable experience—Murray swiftly moves away from the everyday, weaving a new, almost absurdist, world around recounted sights and sounds. 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. Poems such as “Hallucinated Landscapes,” “An Encounter,” “Merriweather,” “The Invisible Forest,” and “Poem for X,” showcase Murray’s ability to seamlessly move into worlds where readers may find themselves unable to unravel the real from the imagined: The sky was cloudless. I imagined planets beyond the moon’s clipped Fingernail. ... My head was filled with chatter, memories of people I’d hurt, hours spent roaming a bookstore only to depart empty-handed. ... Once, long ago, in a poem, I wrote, "The lindens are glazed with frost at five in the morning, and we nod to the violet distance." ... Summer arrives like a hot rivet in hot sand under a vast moonless sky. Indeed, much of this collection exists within Murray’s imagined world; at the same time, Black Observatory contemplates very real human emotion. The poems in this collection dance expertly between the real and the absurd, exploring relationships, the natural world, memory, and the future's uncertainty. In the penultimate poem, Murray writes, “After all of this, / I stepped forward and found you. The past has collapsed / Like a fortress of earth. I don’t know the future.” ⋆ |
Christopher Brean Murray is the author of Black Observatory, which was selected by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2021-22 Jake Adam York Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Quarterly West, Washington Square Review, and other journals. He lives in Houston.
Marissa Ahmadkhani holds an MA in English from Cal Poly SLO and splits her time between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, the minnesota review, Radar Poetry, and poets.org, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015, 2017, and 2022. She serves as Assistant Editor of The West Review.
Marissa Ahmadkhani holds an MA in English from Cal Poly SLO and splits her time between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, the minnesota review, Radar Poetry, and poets.org, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015, 2017, and 2022. She serves as Assistant Editor of The West Review.