Teth

TETH, Sheila Murphy's latest collection, sifts through daily experience to forge "new methods of occurring/ in the world." In poems that enact Zukofskyan riots of attention, the consonantal fireworks of phrases like "borscht akimbo during vodka" interrogate the "ever perjuring" familiarity of our habitual and "mildly newspaperish lingo." Coupling domestic reveries with searing political commentaries, Murphy insistently seeks "to meet the neck that segregates/ the mind from form." "Sheila Murphy compels repetition, invites it, precisely because what she repeats is an action, the sitting down with the mind alive to all that's around... What her eye falls on, kites, clothespins, record jackets, gets in but not (so much) as diurnal notation, this because this-then, but as a religious trusting of the perceptual manifold to be an Event"-Gerald Burns, from the preface.