Jason Morphew

Dead Boy Jason Morphew

Jason Morphew presents a supercharged, sometimes unsettling view of domestic life in Dead Boy, his striking debut. While many of the situations described here seem familiar -- a trip to CVS, a young daughter who explodes when told it's time for dinner -- they're presented with an edginess and sharp intelligence that makes the poems pop.

Elizabeth Lund in the Washington Post

In this startling debut collection, Jason Morphew creates a world more real than the reality we think we live--his poems evoke landscapes and innerscapes at once recognizable and surreal, sensual and death-haunted, populated by vitamixes and mystics and canadian whisky and the American south and encounters at CVS. The quest to live without numbing oneself (through narcotics or love or sex or material accommodations) is a struggle at the heart of these saturated, vividly intelligent and often wryly funny poems. This powerful books of poems will accompany you into your best days and your mislaid days, capturing exquisitely that odd realization of adulthood: "What now? Am i really mortal?"

Meghan O'rourke, Author Of Sun In Days And The Long Goodbye



I marvel at Morphew's ability to plumb the domestic for its latent existential horrors, its disturbing hilarity, the coolly controlled hysteria that is everywhere in the mundane, from blenders full of Placenta to testicles bursting with the unexpected power of future-making. Dead Boy manages to be breezy, salty, sordid and downright serious all at once, newly mythologizing stories of love, death, and procreation few are lucky enough to glimpse in the brief spasm of living between the kept appointments and broken appliances that make up our lives.

Lexa Hillyer, Author Of Acquainted With The Cold