Beyond the Bother of Sunlight by Lewis LaCook and Sheila E. Murphy

Lewis LaCook and Sheila E. Murphy each make poetry that is based on a heightened sense of the swarming and proteic emotional and experiential – even historical – resonances of the events, processes, and situations of very keenly felt human lives. This means that they both over- and under-lay these processes/experiences with many other things from the complexities of any present moment, so the reader sees/thinks these many things simultaneously, like looking through many transparent layers of images, all superimposed. This is writing that is not so much concerned with presenting any kind of rhetorical moral “correctness” (the most visible – and tedious – mode of American poetry for some time now), as in creating a truly complete human world. So one would expect a collaboration between these two poets to be especially poignant and resonant, and this wonderful book does not disappoint: “Here in the large city, there is a sprawl of them inducing/Surface of another pyramid/The mind floats far away from what I do/While staying focused on that shimmer,/If it’s there and I’ve not simply dreamed it”. So the language and complex clarity of this book is uniquely calm and fevered, at the same time; strong and edgy; to-the-point and digressive - “desire occurs in waves” like the pulsing currents of this marvellous excursion. It is clear but not pat, and rewards numerous readings. It is not a book to “get” and then put down forever; it is one that is ultimately a confirmation of human experience, of human being, and is so while including the wide and varied range of that experience: “A quality of focus satiates the inward/What lives outside/The body is another body that returns/Inside the body so identity remains/A landscape in your land”.

—John M. Bennett
September 2011

Sheila E. Murphy has lived in Phoenix, Arizona most of her adult life.
Originally educated as a flutist, Murphy turned to poetry, and has
written actively and had work published for more than three decades.
She added visual art and visual poetry to her work in the late 1990s.
Murphy's consulting firm, Sheila Murphy, LLC, provides services in
leadership development and Executive Advisement™ for the private
and public sectors, in addition to research and policy studies.
Recent poetry publications include Toccatas in the Key of D (Blue Lion
Books); Continuations (a textual collaboration with Douglas Barbour);
Quaternity (a textual collaboration with Scott Glassman); how to spell the
sound of everything (textual collaboration with mIEKAL aND; and
Permutoria (visual poetry collaboration with K.S. Ernst).

Lewis LaCook was born in Lorain, Ohio and began writing poetry in his
early teens. At sixteen, Black River Review first published his work;
subsequently, small press journals like Whiskey Island, the Coventry Reader,
and Lost and Found Times published LaCook's poetry. In 2000 Anabasis
published his long poem Cling as a chapbook. LaCook's use of the
Internet as a multimedia and distributive tool lead to his exploring it for
its own sake, and his early works in this genre met with some success;
Rhizome.org began accepting his works into their artBase in 2002, and
online venues like CTheory Multimedia, Cauldron and Net, Artifacts at Web
Del Sol, 3rd Bed and Slope presented his works on their web sites. Since
2004 he has published his poems primarily on his blog, Xanax Pop
(http://www.xanaxpop.org), and has written and published several long
poems as e-books both independently and under other imprints,
including Hundred-year-old Hummingbird and The Bubblegum Harvest,
forthcoming from Chalk Editions.

Lewis currently lives in Forestville, New York, with his wife, writer
Lindsay Morrison, and makes his living as a web developer and search
engine marketer.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-015-6