Christopher Brean Murray
is the author of Black Observatory (Milkweed Editions, 2023), which was chosen by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2022 Jake Adam York Prize. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. There he was awarded the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and an Academy of American Poets Prize. He served as online poetry editor of Gulf Coast, and his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, and other journals. He lives in Houston, Texas.
“In Christopher Brean Murray’s Black Observatory, characters set out on adventures in a world not quite like our own. They enter museums of impossible objects, venture down forest paths to strangely abandoned settlements, or wander along the industrial outskirts of eerie cities. All at once, the new American painters—all of them? everywhere?—act in unison, as if their simultaneous cooperation had some specific, perhaps insidious, intent. Here, everything is off-kilter and mysterious. Speakers move through unnerving landscapes with a mixture of curiosity, ambivalence, and moments of startling insight. This is a brilliant first book, one I will return to with pleasure.”
— Kevin Prufer
“Its very strangeness, its eccentric lenses on cis masculinity, and its simple, formal elegance called me to Black Observatory. Reading these poems is like embarking on a Twilight Zone episode where Franz Kafka bumps into Salvador Dalí in a hardware store, and dark, absurdist adventures ensue; where ‘Crimes of the Future’ involve ‘Quitting a job everyone agrees you should keep’ and ‘Kissing a foreigner at a time of war.’ There’s sweetness here, too, and deep thought and feeling―this is a singular debut by a singular sensibility: no one else sounds like Murray.”
— Dana Levin
Christopher Brean Murray: Poet 