Painted Bride Quarterlys Slush Pile

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 appr