Original Poem: Pharoah Sanders Donating Blood to Buy Food, 1962
Sean MurphyA young Sanders with his mentor and bandmate John Coltrane Huge gratitude to the team at Decolonial Passage for including my work in their "Food, Power, and Powerlessness" issue. (It's…
Original Poem: St. James’s Place
I've only been to Atlantic City one time (friend's bachelor party, obvi) and, admittedly, not being a gambler or fan of rooms thick with cigarette smoke (circa 2002), and loathing…
The Fire Sermon: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” at 100
Art is long, and Time is fleeting, Longfellow wrote, and we’d already read it—words largely if not entirely lost on the average university freshman. It was 1989, and I was…
Kurt Vonnegut at 100
So It Goes: Reflections on Kurt Vonnegut (written after his death in 2007 and included in my first collection of non-fiction, Murphy's Law Vol. One). Kurt Vonnegut would say in…
Deliver Me From Nowhere: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ at 40
Perhaps because of what followed—the next album, the acclaim—Springsteen’s decision to make the ultimate lo-fi album seems even more prescient, appropriate, and perfect. If Darkness on the Edge of Town was a,…
Original Poem: Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Bottle
It's a thrill to once again grace the pages of The Blue Mountain Review. As someone who runs an exceedingly modest (though sublimely designed -- thanks again to 1455 Creative…
Barbara Ehrenreich and the Dignity of Labor
image via The Nation It seems specious, even disingenuous, to suggest that a well-known, best-selling author is both underrated and insufficiently read. As it happens, Barbara Ehrenreich, one of the…
Original Poem: South Loudon Street, First Sustained Frost
Big thanks to Plum Tree Tavern for publishing two of my poems in their latest issue, which explores the topic of Homelessness. (And thanks to them for bearing witness; with…
Original Poem: The Voices in Your Head
Big thanks to Plum Tree Tavern for publishing two of my poems in their latest issue, which explores the topic of Homelessness. (And thanks to them for bearing witness; with…
Original Poem: South Loudon Street, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
Pretty amazing to share space with the remarkable Diane Seuss (Pulitzer Prize winner, folks) and be part of The Blue Mountain Review, an absolute top tier journal I've admired for…