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
There’s something at once acid and recklessly romantic about this book, with its moody turns of line, skyless interiority, and febrile images. Like Caravaggio with his radical portrayals of archetypal religious scenes and audacious use of highlight and shadow, Miguel Murphy does not stint in his appraisals of the life of the spirit and the flesh; you feel everywhere in these poems, the reality of the body and the pathos of a life.
—Sandra Lim
In Shoreditch, Miguel Murphy displays his virtuosity as a vocalist at ease in the cosmopolitan precincts of high art and the “underworld opera” of desire and sexual ferocity. Through a strobe-light impressionism of personas and works drawn from the history of art and cinema, these finely-scored poems name the all-consuming promises of immortality in youth in order to refute the fading starlight of bodies in pleasure.
—Roberto J. Tejada
