Edisonia by Richard Murray

Welcome to Edisonia, a condition of being and mind as much as a place on an actual map of  New Jersey. Your guide is Richard Murray, a poet intimately familiar with this terrain, whose mystery-leavened lines point you to where the long shadow of Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park with whom Murray shares a birthdate, falls across the bones of the indigenous Lenape people and not everything is always as it seems. Human inventiveness of the Edison variety, in Murray’s view, often comes up short compared to the natural world, especially when curiosity and the spirit of discovery are fueled by ill-conceived intentions. “What good’s this shit?” Murray asks in “Glam Dicinn,” and the question, ostensibly about his own work and poetry in general, is aimed at a larger worldview. Well, a lot of good, if you ask me, and here we have Murray’s poems to back that notion up perfectly.