Little joy : poems
Publication Information
Stevens Point, Wisconsin : Cornerstone Press, University of Wisonsin-Stevens Point, [2026]
Physical Description
88 pages ; 22 cm.
Series
Summary
"Like someone looking for a lost key, Matthew Murrey searches the world around him-an el platform in Chicago above a vacant lot, a hidden lake in the Northwoods of Minnesota, a blind man on a city street playing a black guitar for alms. What is it the poet seeks? A little joy? Yes, that must be it, for these poems leave us positively transported, transformed, transfixed by joy. This book is accomplished, lovely, and moving. What more might we ask of poetry?"
Contents
- I. Here, where I lay down. Swallow
- The rowboat
- For the joy, for nothing
- Cycling
- Vermin
- Inky
- Water on my back, Chicago
- 55th Street, Chicago
- Shifting
- Refugee snow
- Here, where I lay down
- Shamelessexuberance
- Transfiguration
- II. Scissors. Beauty stopped washing
- The red shoes
- Classical guitar
- Like that
- That cosmopolitan man
- Brancusi's sleeping muse
- Scrim
- Scissors
- Eleanor, Chicago 1953
- Boys running into the surf at Lake Tanganyika
- The black guitar
- Before the dancers
- III. Where the ice took me. In the nostalgia chair
- Born in winter in Florida
- Manger
- My solstice
- Where the ice took me
- Cacao, Chicago
- Threading north and south
- Remembering fire
- Standing by
- Bigger than your hand
- Tin
- Bridge
- IV. The devotions. Little laughing Buddha
- Garden of love
- What I did on a rainy day
- Arc
- Spice
- Rust and sweat
- The devotions
- Ripe
- Afterlife
- This spring the peonies
- Heat
- The strange cabinet
- Buoyancy
- V. Paradise. Long into the night
- Slumbers
- Map to the moon
- Constellations
- In the thick of it
- Smoke
- Drunk in the basil
- I walked into the fire pit
- Paradise
- Not Paris
- Godwit
- Four lights