Body Politic adds to the conversation of a generation with poetry that invokes thoughtful reflection. Whether you read for the love of poetry, to cheer and contemplate your beliefs, or simply to get a better understanding of other viewpoints, Body Politic delivers stunning poetry and deeply interesting reflections on relevant topics today. This is a must read! Praise for Rich Murphy! Rarely do I like explicitly political poetry, yet Richard Murphy may have convinced me otherwise. Murphy shows in Body Politic how poems can be polemical without being didactic, philosophical without throwing out any of a poems linguistic or moral core. Murphy manages to be both heartfelt and playful, ironic and sincere, language-drivenand wild with the material world. Truly worth savoring a few times both as individual poems and as an entire collection. - C. Derick Varn, editor of Former People The poems found in Body Politic are the essential poems of today, a persistent and passionate fugue, an irony, something we need, an elixir for the malaise of paralysis that has engulfed an increasingly terrified humanity. We only have to consider the facts. We need to read these poems. - Michael Rothenberg Rich Murphy's Body Politic delivers a litany of lyrical and surreal protests against the "conspicuous unsaid [that] rules the state for the mind" of a nation addicted to perpetual war and processed news. Murphy's songs of struggle are strong medicine for "the subject and the drunken, resilient question mark behind the eyes." Body Politic is a diagnosis and antidote for the cancer of our times. "No one with a breath escapes." These are poems of resistance and revival. - W. Scott Howard, University of Denver