Voyeur

Winner of the 2009 Los Angeles Book Festival Award for Poetry & Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award --"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