London Grip Poetry Review – Jason Morphew

 

Poetry review – EJECT CITY: Charles Rammelkamp considers a fairly dark collection by Jason Morphew

 

 

 Eject City
Jason Morphew
Poets Wear Prada, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946116-29-1
$21.00      87 pages

Dedicated to his late father, Gary Joe Morphew, Jason Morphew’s new collection is a meditation on family, time and expectations. After the cleverly titled initial poem, “Touch Anywhere to Get Started,” with its echo of modern-day online lingo, an invitation to the reader to dive in, Morphew writes in “Visitation”:

       Keith Richards smoked his father

		  mine smoked me

	       these are my ashes

	  spread me like the space

         between religious sounds.

Right away you notice the short lines, the sparse punctuation, the way thoughts bleed into one another. But the overall sense of the lines is the blanketing of the consciousness by one’s forebears, the reverent hush that marks one’s passage through time, between om and shalom. Eject City is a meditation on grief and guilt and love, so nicely captured in the image of ash, and the Keith Richards allusion introduces Morphew’s music theme. Morphew is telling us in that line, that phrase, ‘these are my ashes’ that what we are reading is both confession and absolution, transgression and forgiveness. The poem “Now that my father’s ash” continues this image from “Visitation.” As we read on, we begin to understand the grief and confusion.

“Unconditional Love” begins:

	My father’s siblings
	when he died
	texted that his wife
	gave him what I didn’t
	unconditional love.

This reads like an accusation, of course, and the poem goes on to mention ‘barring a father’s / only child from his only / father’s funeral.’ We later read in “Heritage” that the poet has just returned home to California ‘from Arkansas where I was barred / from my father’s funeral.’ In “Floyd Davies,” a poem about a comment on the funeral home’s “Condolences Page”, he writes:

	years later my father died
	after not speaking to me again
	for years or knowing his grandchildren
	and a twisted strap his wife
	obituarized him by naming
	herself his lone survivor

Floyd Davies, whoever he is, takes issue with that, noting the existence of the surviving son. But it’s like a footnote nobody reads; it’s like ashes. In the poem “Brakes” Morphew writes:

When I was 5
my mother married 
again and my father 
in fury slammed 
his brakes 
on the freeway 
to scream 
he was my only dad.
As a richer man raised me 
my father floored it
marrying an adopted woman 
divorced with abandoned daughters
and said he was their dad.
It was even in his obituary.
When I hitchhiked 
truth into the local paper 
the abysm woman 
barred me from 
my father’s funeral.

The whole family melodrama reads like a car crash, a pile-up on the interstate. Slam on the brakes, indeed. Stalled by the side of the highway, it may be time to consider the problem from a wider angle, from a political and genetic standpoint. In “Politics,” Morphew gets down to the nitty gritty:

	Born white
	evangelical scum
	I whacked away
	my rural life
	to forget
	my failure
        as sperm—
        now I drive
        my canyon life
        into my lyric
       Jewish wife
       to forget
       my failure
       as sperm—

But of course he never “forgets.” How can he? His ‘failure as sperm,’ an elemental image that is saturated in anguish and heartache, suggests the guilt he feels for being a disappointment to his father. But his father is racist, anti-Semitic, and for all the family feeling and blood gratitude this can’t simply be ignored. “Press Release: Confederate Sculpture Garden” may not refer directly to his father, but the politics are as clear as Morphew’s disgust and horror.
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A singer-songwriter with more than a dozen albums released on various indie labels (The Duke of Arkansas is one), Morphew writes a good deal about music and musicians in Eject City. “When there was a music industry,” “Ikey” ( a poem about Isaiah Owens, a keyboardist who played with Jack White among others), and “Classical Music” are titles that reflect this background. And even though its subject – along with two poems that follow (“Suzanne” and “Suzanne II” ) – is a murder in the extended family, “Murder Rap” is a rap lyric inspired by Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.

Remember when the Southern Baptists burned Beatles records after Lennon said they were more popular than Jesus? That whole southern thing about “the devil’s music”? There’s something going on about that here, too. In “Often on Wednesday nights” Morphew’s Pogues, Prince and Judas Priest albums are targeted by ‘Xian authorities,’ the records destroyed; his mother tells him, I’m so proud of you son. It only adds to his alienation.

Often, as we see here and in “Murder Rap,” the music poems come back to his family. The poem “Gene Watson,” starts with a reflection on the country singer as the poet sits in a bar on Sunset Boulevard, about the cover of Watson’s album, Should I Come Home (Or Should I Go Crazy)? But soon enough Morphew is considering his father again.

my left hand which my father
forced me to throw from
as a righthanded child
because he wanted me to be
Sandy Koufax and couldn’t
see his antisemitism.
I still can’t throw from my right hand
and am raising Jews
with my father’s last name.

It’s those children with his father’s last name that point to Morphew’s sense of redemption. He’s crazy about them, you can tell, in poems like “Where is all the fun hidden?” and “Teddy Boy” (‘I think my son knows that / love is running toward a precipice / you didn’t know was there.’)

The final three poems in Eject City also take a kind of optimistic turn. “Hope for the Future” is a tender exchange between father and daughter, and the last poem in the collection is full of a determined resolution. “Haiku for the Duration,” with its echo of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” (‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’), reads:

	Yes it passes in
	a flash but without the light
	why would darkness be?