Dream Machine
Sade Murphy
88 pages, paperback
ISBN-13: 978-0988819931
co-im-press, 2014
Review by Jeffrey Hecker
At the close of her Selected Poems, Rita Dove presents a chronology of her Pulitzer Prize-Winning characters Thomas and Beulah’s significant milestones. She ultimately ends the timeline in April 1969, when Beulah passes away. Since ancestry must continue, I’d use a bullet point • to honor co-im-press’s 2014 publication of Sade Murphy’s Dream Machine.
Swap hard-working, empathetic Thomas with a creepy, faceless, sexier bastard, and instead of calling him Thomas, call him Him. Imagine Beulah, but trade her personal Northern migration for a linguistic investigation into outrage’s roots. Then somehow manage to incorporate amazing fruit and vegetable imagery. Dream Machine crowd-surfs the absurd, disturbs the sleeping, pinches the conscious on both cheeks Dutch-Colonial style, frightens the tranquil, and stimulates arm-stub nerve-endings like Johns Hopkins researchers attempting to help frustrated amputees.
Murphy’s poems are offered in brief declarative flare bursts. There are no titles, just seemingly random number sequences. Murphy sounds like Beulah would have sounded if her life had spanned all the moon phases of hip-hop. From progressive breakdance
(I put my babies in a feather crib)
(Joan Crawford was after me)
To communally sarcastic
(my boot-flap bruise is sweeting)
(Armageddon banjo tunnel camper parlors annoy me so braid your heaters putz)
To perhaps a smidge corny
(You place your beanie babies atop the slot machine)
(When did I become a semicolon?)
To full-on gangster
(If you crossed me I would nail your sack to the floor and set the whole house on fire leaving you with a rusty butter knife)
(In grocery aisles baby blob arachnids bowling glass Coca-Cola bottles)
Back to another progressive beat fueled by mama-bear bards such as Harryette Mullen
(Humming to black and white British people)
(I moved closer to the bed, because I knew the King of Pop was rotting under those Swissed sheets)
To currently twisting in a state of atmospheric dislocation like Dune, the spice planet:
(I keep my virtue close but my vices closer)
(I prefer my feather inside the world)
Beulah would not entirely comprehend Murphy’s voice, but she would be proud of it nonetheless. And Murphy wouldn’t care if anybody was proud of it. That’s what makes her future as a poet so damned fun to footprint.
Jeffrey Hecker was born in 1977 in Norfolk, Virginia. He’s the author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011) & the chapbooks Hornbook (Horse Less Press, 2012), Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside Press, 2013), & Before He Let Them Guide Sleigh (ShirtPocket Press, 2013). Recent work has appeared in Mascara Literary Review, Atticus Review, La Fovea, Zocalo Public Square, The Burning Bush 2, LEVELER, Spittoon, & similar: peaks. He holds a degree from Old Dominion University. He resides with his wife Robin.