I WAS SO taken with Murillo’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Gunfire,” a sonnet sequence that appeared in Best American Poetry 2020, that I went online to look for his books. All I could find at the moment was this—since it was published in 2020, I figured it had to include the sequence. Turns out, though, this is a 2020 reprint of his first book, published in 2009. No harm done, though—this book turned out to be brilliant.
As in the sonnet sequence that pulled me in, Up Jump the Boogie combines deft handling of traditional forms—this book has three sestinas, and a refashioning of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”—with you-can-almost-taste-it evocations of the streets where and the culture in which Murillo grew up: Eazy E, George Clinton, the Leonard-Durán fight, kung fu movies, basketball on cement courts with chain-link nets. The perfect example of the book’s unique blend: a ghazal titled “Hustle.”
Up Jump the Boogie has a sequence of its own, “Flowers for Etheridge,” a tribute to a poetic father, Etheridge Knight, that includes parallel tributes to Murillo’s mentor, Larry Levis, to Levis’s tutelary figure John Keats, and to Murillo’s literal father. The whole sequence demonstrates what you sense throughout the book, that Murillo has mastered the tradition without being assimilated by it.
By the way, “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn” is in Murillo’s actual most recent book, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, which I ordered before I even finished this one.
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