"Murphy's poetry unfolds in an uncanny valley of sorts, where the landscape is both disturbingly post-human and credibly recognizable. These poems are airtight, laced with a delicate hodgepodge of technological absurdism and intergalactic longing. The reality in Murphy's lines is that our tools of escape--meditation, exercise, neighborly courtesies--are ineffective substitutes for a future in which present-day planet Earth, Murphy's main antagonist, can be left behind. Taken as a whole, the book evokes the sensibility of Naked Lunch with only about a quarter of the surrealism, a tough truth to confront."
--Katie Sions, Editor-in-Chief, Rumble Fish Quarterly
"This is a vital collection of prayers for our flaws to 'shape into wings.' Rich Murphy's Practitioner Joy performs linguistic 'triage for the wounds / and memes' of our habitual misrule on planet Earth. Murphy's songs and sutures--intimate, sardonic, vulnerable--bear witness to 'imagination and desire, [pounding] from the inside.' In the midst of popular madness, Murphy's poems show us how to practice joyful sounds of flight."
--W. Scott Howard, University of Denver
"Murphy's poetry in Practitioner Joy often begins with 'the myth playing technicolor in the cranium' but moves through the 'caveat acts, the bracketed, ellipses' to show how modern life often begins with a joke and ends with a sigh--a sigh of resignation, a sigh of relief, a sigh of despair, but a sigh. Poetry in this collection moves from all the shades of emotion and often meta-poetically reflects back on itself and society through a slanted mirror. Serious in his whimsy, and joyous in his irony, Rich Murphy gives us a collection that practices what it preaches: telling the truth, but slant and with a wry smile."
--C. Derick Varn, editor of Former People and author of Apocalyptics
