Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

Starred review from March 16, 2020
The lucid and urgent second collection from Murillo (Up Jump the Boogie) is composed of 18 lyric poems bookended by a sonnet crown sequence meditating on the deadly shooting of three Brooklyn men. Unflinching and self-implicating (“your hands will shame you often”), Murillo’s speakers paint vivid portraits of neighborhood life, entwining past and present in “the sudden, overcast quiet of the past tense.” These poems juxtapose bruising firsthand experience against dry conceptual categories (“On Lyric Narrative,” “On Confessionalism”) with a dexterous sense of rhythm and internal and end rhyme as influenced by The Notorious B.I.G. and Elizabeth Bishop. Murillo’s rage against stereotypes and systemic injustice burns through these poems, which are often self-critical of enclaves (in a typical moment, cops watch protesting poets “No doubt amused. As when/ a mastiff meets a yapping lapdog”). In “On Prosody,” a childhood memory is triggered by overhearing neighbors fighting, revealing Murillo’s brilliant associative control. Wearing its formal mastery with a light touch, the book shapes firsthand experience into memorable meditations on cultural moments past and present, individual and collective.

March 1, 2020

"The jazzman, I think, wanted only/ to get it down pure" says Murillo (Up Jump the Boogie) in a startling poem about how much he can--or cannot--empathize with a sparrow trapped in a car door. And that's his own aim: to get down pure the pain of living, particularly in a world contorted by institutional racism. He reveals here the uneasy balance of learning to save himself in a bruising environment, where he must "Start with loss. Lose everything. Then lose it all again." Thus does he articulate the African American experience in language that's intimate, even conversational, yet carefully crafted for maximum effect. "You've heard this one before, in which there's blood," he confides in "A Refusal, To Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn," echoing Dylan Thomas in a search not for poignancy but truth. VERDICT Essential for #ownvoices collections.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2020
In this clear-eyed collection of highly referential, yet decidedly grounded poems, widely acclaimed writer Murillo adopts a deceptively conversational tone to address violence in Black communities, and the broad landscape of American poetics. Murillo names poetic devices (confessionalism, metaphor, and prosody) to launch deeply introspective reflections on a youth spent in California and everyday domesticities. But the book's centerpiece, "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn," takes the form of a sonnet redoubl�, a series of 15 linked sonnets which share lines and, in Murillo's case, include epigraphs from such present-day poets as Danez Smith, Julian Randall, and Terrance Hayes. The poem itself is modeled after Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," which adds another layer of stirring, lyrical complexity. Murillo proves himself to be steeped in the traditions of American poetry, carving his own path and curating his own canon. With the recent reissue of his debut, Up Jump the Boogie (2010), readers will be able to dive into this poet's intelligent oeuvre.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)