EVEN BETTER THAN his first book (Up Jumped the Boogie). This one too deals often with the rougher precincts of urban life in street-inflected language, but at the same time shows extraordinary formal control and familiarity with the traditions of English verse.
This book includes the poem (or poems) that got my attention in the 2020 Best American Poetry, "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn." The title is a tip of the hat to Dylan Thomas, which is nice, but the astonishing thing is that Murillo pulls off a crown of sonnets, moreover a heroic crown of sonnets, while digging down into one of the most painful and urgent problems of our time and place, state violence against the Black community.
The volume also includes "On Confessionalism" and "Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Kinds of Birds,"likewise published in the BAP series (2019 and 2017, respectively). Both show how skillful Murillo is at taking an idea for a walk into some surprising places, a more compressed David Antin.
The penultimate poem, "On Prosody" manages to encompass Emerson and Frost while telling a terrible but all too credible story of how things were in Murillo's childhood neighborhood, and then ends with a sonnet that is a re-mix of a Notorious B.I.G. lyric but also a sort of apologia pro vita sua.
How does he do it?
I also find myself also wondering...how old is he? Gray in the beard, so past 45, I guess, making it a surprise that Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is only his second book. There is not a dud poem in here, however, so maybe it's just a question of quality control.
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