Christopher Brean Murray - Black Observatory / by Sharon Israel

LISTEN to my April 11th, 2023 WIOX show (also a podcast!) featuring award-winning poet Christopher Brean Murray whose debut collection Black Observatory, published by Milkweed Editions, was selected by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2021-22 Jake Adam York Prize. Planet Poet’s Poet-at-Large, writer and visual artist Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the program to bring us her unique poetic insights and the latest in poetry news.


Christopher Brean Murray has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and Inprint Houston and he served as online poetry editor of Gulf Coast.  His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Washington Square Review and other journals. He lives in Houston, Texas.

 “Its very strangeness, its eccentric lenses on cis masculinity, and its simple, formal elegance called me to Black Observatory.  Reading these poems is like embarking on a Twilight Zone episode where Franz Kafka bumps into Salvador Dali in a hardware store, and dark, absurdist adventures ensue; where ‘Crimes of the Future’ involve ‘Quitting a job everyone agrees you should keep’ and ‘Kissing a foreigner in a time of war.”  There’s sweetness here, too, and deep thought and feeling – this is a singular debut by a singular sensibility:  no one else sounds like Murray.”  -- Dana Levin

 “In Christopher Brean Murray’s Black Observatory, characters set out on adventures in a world not quite like our own.  They enter museums of impossible objects, venture down forest paths to strangely abandoned settlements, or wander along the industrial outskirts of eerie cities.  All at once, the new American painters – all of them? everywhere? – act in unison, as if their simultaneous cooperation had some specific, perhaps insidious intent. Here, everything is off-kilter and mysterious.  Speakers move thorough unnerving landscapes with a mixture of curiosity, ambivalence, and moments of startling insight.  This is a brilliant first book, one I will return to with pleasure.” – Kevin Prufer