SHOREDITCH

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Miguel Murphy's poems--terse, grave, erudite--offer gleaming surfaces for a reader to savor: traces of a heroic, louche tradition, where Novarro, Genet, Lorca, Pasolini, and other role models still make possible new discoveries about martyrdom and ecstasy. In SHOREDITCH, we cruise the epitaphs, reenact the melodramas, and taste the paradoxes, almost Sapphic in their concentration, their hieratic fruit-forwardness. Murphy tailors the pleasure-pain conundrum in a sublimely minimalist style that I want always to be wearing.--Wayne Koestenbaum