Murmur

A deeply embodied collection, Cameron Barnett’s Murmur uses a congenital heart murmur as its guiding metaphor to investigate the physiological, ancestral, racial, and poetic resonances of the heart, blood, and breath, along with their disturbances, arrhythmias, and doublings. “The body I / was born with is a collection of hinges. Yes, the heart. Yes, the spirit. Yes, / the mind.”

Seven short poems titled “Murmur” are woven throughout the book, as signposts connecting a heart murmur diagnosed in infancy with the scars, fears, and heartbreak of adulthood. Between the caution imposed by his murmur (“a swoosh in the space / between the beatings”), and the dangers inscribed upon living in America as a person of color, Barnett crafts poems that yoke together the explosive births of cosmos (tectonics, black holes, Andromeda, earthquakes) and of self as “paradox[es] of containment.”

Murmur expands its somatic, aesthetic, and planetary pursuit of order to the realm of social and political justice with the inclusion of concrete, erasure, anaphoric, and double golden shovel poems. The book examines themes of creation and decreation, recognition and invisibility, and the question of how to discern between lies and myths. The ways in which racial injustice is marked on the body abound:

the redlining of my heart
                    ≥
    the ministrelsy of property value
anywhere I go is an interracial space

Ultimately, Murmur proposes romantic love and eros as forces capable of reconstituting the poet’s fissured body and self:

If the body is just a trick,
a collective nothingness
[…]
                  then it’s no wonder
I never felt whole
until you kissed me.

Along with intimacy, Barnett invokes Martin Luther King Jr.’s epochal words, asking the reader to “Consider Blackness, supermassive and free of gravity, / bending the arc of the moral universe all the way around until it’s whole.”

At once ballast and ballad, Murmur measures the pulse of personal and collective legacies in euphonic, mesmeric prosody that foregrounds the body as the keeper of memory, movement, and song:

                                                             Today my arteries
are storm drains full of sticky sweets, full
        of holding on, letting go, holding on,
letting go, holding on.