poetry chapbook
ISBN 978-1-957746-21-0
41 pages
 
“Beyond the shattered piazza on the outskirts, / there was not a hangar, not a horse” says the speaker of one poem in Christopher Brean Murray's chapbook The Fugitive Lands. These lines are emblematic of the emotional terrain of these narratives and lyrics: an odd zone of clues and remnants shot through with danger, loss, and beauty. The curious yet bewildered speakers who navigate this terrain are alienated yet seek understanding and connection in a world that is “multifarious and inexplicable.” Whether they inspect a museum in a mobile home “tucked into the shade of redwoods” or enter a theater where the performance occurs in the viewer’s memory, these speakers function like researchers eager to fathom “the scheme of things,” which may be as elusive as the rumored “fugitive lands.”
 
Praise for The Fugitive Lands:
 
The Fugitive Lands is darkly whimsical, an utter adventure in language, place, character, and curiosity. With a voice that charms through hysterical and flatly precise attentions, these poems contemplate in a fashion notably distinct—begging questions one cannot help but extend to their own (sur)realities: Are we in a fantasy or nightmare? And who is there with us? Murray’s singular lyric offers no neat answers; the entire collection is chimerical. Adele Elise Williams
 
The Fugitive Lands is a gripping read. The fugitive lands themselves, though, “defy description.” An elusive refuge for the seeking speakers that is unmarred by “devastation, / greed, loss, and blind hatred,” this empyrean realm is only glimpsed in a mirror in a painting, through the haze of memory, or from a summit that one imagines cresting before returning to the myriad landscapes and figures that are keenly described in Murray’s poems, where “fate choreographs / its horrendous torrential dance.” Despite the destruction and danger, one is drawn to this lush world’s humor, surprise, and mystery, as one attempts to decipher a voice seeping from a drainage pipe, astral portents, radio shrapnel, a cryptic dictionary. In the absence of understanding or deliverance, one can at least take shelter under an upturned canoe. Joe Fletcher