Black Arts & Culture Feature:
Reviewed by Patricia Carragon
Eject City
by Jason Morphew
Poets Wear Prada
2025, 88 pp, ISBN: M0D2083622255
In Eject City, we enter a fragmented world of pain and grief, bottled up for years. Unlike fine wine, pain and grief simmer in the darkness of unsettled family histories that refuse to stay buried, a monster that needs to rage before it is set free from its crypt. Morphew is not afraid to dig into his past, to do his own “shadow work.” He transforms his agony into art. An art form that is helping him heal.
In “Bell’s Palsy,” Morphew suffered a facial paralysis during a Slash concert in Laurel Canyon. This poem explores a sudden loss of control in both language and form. He writes in two columns, where meanings can either be read across or down. But the intensity cannot be camouflaged. We know he is depressed with the current political situation and his own. The concert setting underscores this tension—a public performance colliding with a private crisis, joy disrupted by sudden vulnerability. In “Bell’s Palsy,” poetry itself becomes a reflection of the body’s betrayals and the outside world.
Where “Bell’s Palsy” is about physical disruption, “Suzanne” delves into the intimate world of memory and shame. The poem emerges from a dream state. A dream so unsettling, like a reality dosed with drugs and an unraveling marriage. The poem’s disorientation is internal, lodged in voice and syntax. The backstory behind the poem is about Morphew’s cousin Barry Morphew, who has been re-arrested for killing Suzanne Morphew and is currently in prison, awaiting trial. Beyond the history, “Suzanne” captures grief, absence, and loss in one of his strongest poems, leaving only unresolved questions to haunt the mind.
In “Now that’s my father’s ash,” Morphew writes about his heartfelt experience—carrying his father’s ashes in a bag, alongside a tube of toothpaste—a bizarre contrast of an everyday item versus the human remains of a living person. Unlike the formal experimentation of “Bell’s Palsy” or the fragmentary drift of “Suzanne,” this poem is blunt simplicity but has power in its context. Death goes beyond the grief of losing a loved one. Death is a part of life, like brushing your teeth. That legacy and mortality are never distant abstractions; they live among us, pressing against our daily lives.
Throughout Eject City, Morphew embraces life not as an accident but as a method. The collection’s wide range of styles—shape poems, elegiac lyrics, fragmentary meditations—feels less like eclecticism and more like a deliberate embrace of instability. The book suggests that erratic ruptures are the truest interpretation of experience. Bodies fail, families disintegrate, memories blur, and yet poetry persists amid the broken events of life.
Morphew’s background as both a poet and songwriter resonates throughout the collection. Some poems carry a musical cadence; others resist rhythm altogether. Morphew is unafraid to let his poems falter, stutter, or collapse into silence. He is a true artist—a virtuoso who is unafraid to take risks. He transforms his despair and life’s experiences into art—whether of body, of heart, or of legacy. The collection is difficult, inventive, and deeply honest. It will not leave its readers unchanged but may make you think about your trail of shadows.
About the reviewer: Patricia Carragon received a 2025 Best of the Net nomination for her haiku, “Cherry Blossoms,” from Poets Wear Prada. She hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is the editor of Sense & Sensibility Haiku Journal and listed on the poet registry for The Haiku Foundation. Carragon’s jazz poetry collection, Stranger on the Shore, from Human Error Publishing, is forthcoming this year. Her latest novel is Angel Fire (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). Books from Poets Wear Prada are Meowku (2019) and The Cupcake Chronicles (2017). Her book Innocence is from Finishing Line Press (2017).
Review first published at https://writingdisorder.com/eject-city-book-review/
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