What We're Left With

The poems in Ben Murray's debut collection "What We're Left With" reflect on disconnection as a feature of contemporary urban experience. Murray's poems tackle themes of isolation, loneliness and human separation from nature. Murray creates trademark images of surprising loneliness and suburban angst: 'sog-white mornings/ of caffeinated mouths/ mating Cheerios/ O to empty O.' The poet longs for 'mall-free days' of 'sprawling languid under a pre-cancerous sun' when 'we hurry up/ and wait, to become men'. Writing about climate change, the poet asks 'how long until hibernating bears/ shake November from their sleep-under fur/ and start snorting around for off-season/ bargains'. Capable of many different registers, Murray writes, in assumed voices, of grief and memory beyond his own immediate experience, something he describes as 'tapping into some larger collective autobiography'.