Quick: Aphorisms

by George Murray

The highly anticipated follow-up to the wildly popular Glimpse Quick is George Murray’s second collection of aphorisms ― a form that straddles the lines between poetry, philosophy, humour, and prose. He describes these pieces as “poetic essences” ― sometimes even as “poems, without all the poetry getting in the way.” Some are deep, some clever, some funny, some all three. The best, he says, should read like common-sense statements that have never actually been expressed. Built out of more than 450 short statements, Quick is a series of thoughts and ruminations, any one of which could be an entire poem but instead has been compressed into a single profundity. Following his bestselling Glimpse, Murray continues to explore a wide range of from deep existential disquiet to the comforts of the meaning of belief; from what it means to be alive to how the world deals with hate, love, the sublime, and the ridiculous.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published April 11, 2017

About the author

George Murray (born 1971), is a Canadian poet.

Murray was the editor of the literary blog Bookninja, a contributing editor at Maisonneuve magazine, and a contributing editor at several literary magazines and journals. After several years abroad in rural Italy and New York City, in 2005 he returned to Canada. He now lives in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2014, Murray was appointed Poet Laureate of St. John's, NL

Murray's 2007 book, The Rush to Here, a sequence of 57 sonnets, reworks a number of traditional forms (Petrarchan, Spenserian, Shakesperian sonnets) into a new rhyme scheme that employs what the poet refers to as "thought-rhyme", conceptual and semantic pairings that work on the level of synonym, antonym and homonym to create intertextual meaning, as opposed to the sound bonding of traditional aural rhyme. His latest book, Whiteout: Poems, was published in April, 2012.

Murray is married to writer Elisabeth de Mariaffi.

Reviews

[Peter Darbyshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each line in Quick is a nuclear bomb going off in a different part of your mind, melting your thoughts, memories and dreams together and leaving behind beautiful, frozen artifacts of deadly epiphany.

[M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and fun quick read.

[jo ianni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. Thank you, friend.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

short pithy sayings - some funny, some though provoking - did not feel like poetry.