Dolphin Aria/Limited Hours: A Love Song by Luke McMullan

Luke McMullan is prising the nails out of the lyric and holding it ethically accountable for any passivity that might lurk in its corridors. This is a call to occupy, to resist the feasting and destruction. As 'we all dance the liberty frogmarch', he reprocesses the responsibilities of speculating and creating the spectacle of consumer lives. What stuns in this sequence is the performative quality of the work as it negotiates subtle moments of utterance and gesture. There's New York and 'Memphis', but even the oral inheritance/subtext of The Iliad with its ordnance and war dead. It's about adding up the costs. The angel investors are falling around us and the planet aches with opportunism. Capitalist adaptations come unstuck, thwarted by their own expense accounts. At once jagged and smooth, there's delicacy in this confrontation with personal and collective responsibility that can take one's breath away. One of the most intelligent poets writing anywhere, McMullan also has great technical facility and can keep us poised on the edge of the disaster he carefully articulates, and in which we are all culpable — he does this in the hope that we might see and act. This poet will change things for the better.

— John Kinsella

Luke McMullan is a PhD student at New York University, writing on language and dialect strata in modernist long poems. Before that, he worked at a software company that crawled webpages for linguistic and lexical context, on which much of this poem is based. He studied English at Cambridge for three years, and hails from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

This is his second book. His first chapbook, n, was put out by Wide Range (Cambridge, 2012). With Sophie Seita and Ian Heames, he runs the unAmerican Activities series, a live reading event in London and New York, and the New York Stock small press.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 36 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-188-7