Voyeur
Rich Murphy
Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award - 2008.
Winner of the Los Angeles Book Festival Poetry Award 2009
"Voyeur is a work of vision and virtuosity. Concerned with relationships, marriage, sex and power, the poetry is dense, rapid, dazzling, the voice commanding, and the speaker charismatic. Combining multifaceted imagery with sharply angled enjambments and jammed syntax, Rich Murphy creates poems that are like broken glass-beautiful, jagged, risky to handle. But even though they cut-or maybe because they cut-one can't resist picking up piece after piece. The poems are extraordinary as individuals, from the intriguing declarative first sentence of each down to its decisive, glistening last line. And as a collection, like 'a subtle song [that] travels / from ancient feet through hearts / to first breath in the world,' Voyeur is spectacular." -Richard Carr, judge for the Gival Press Poetry Award and author of Honey
Rich Murphy
Rich Murphy holds degrees from Boston University, including a graduate degree in creative writing. He studied with the late George Starbuck and Derek Walcott. For 21 years, he has taught writing and literature and directed undergraduate writing programs at Bradford and Emmanuel Colleges; he currently teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts. His credits include a book of poems The Apple in the Monkey Tree (Codhill Press); chapbooks Great Grandfather (Pudding House Publications), Family Secret (Finishing Line Press), and Hunting and Pecking (Ahadada Press); poems in hundreds of journals in Anglophone countries; and essays in such periodicals as The International Journal of the Humanities, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, Fringe, and Big Toe Review. His essay on poetry’s evolving ecology will be in a special issue of The Journal of Ecocritism (University of British Columbia). His books and chapbooks have been nominated for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Griffin Award, Balcones Center Poetry Award, L.L. Winship / PEN New England Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, and William Carlos Williams Award.
