The Movie My Murderer Makes: Season II by Christopher Shipman

Christopher Shipman is author or co-author of eight books. Keats is Not the Problem, co-authored with Brett Evans, is his most recent collection. Shipman’s work appears in journals such as Cimarron Review, PANK, Plume, Salt Hill, and Spork Press, among many others. His poem, "The Three-Year Crossing," was a winner of the 2015 Motionpoems Big Bridges prize, judged by Alice Quinn. A Ship on the Line (2015), co-authored with Vincent Cellucci, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Shipman lives in New Orleans where he teaches literature and creative writing to high school kids, dances to the Boss with his four-year-old daughter on his shoulders, and plays drums in a punk band.

The sequel we’ve been waiting for from the author of The Movie My Murderer Makes is here: get ready to take a spooky walk (alone but for the ceaselessly turning camera of the murderer) in the epiphany-lit long corridor of Shipman’s loose, fluid, genre-defying prose. Surprising and eerie and tender, this installation takes us deeper into the carnage of memory, exposing the ways an inability to turn off the recording mechanism makes murderers of us all. But Shipman’s willingness to go back, to walk through the haunted rooms of his childhood and our America (in which violence seems to be the condition of meaning’s constellation) is an act of courage and encouragement. We watch the show of the past to find a way forward, learning—from the work of this wonderful poet—how we might yet be redeemed by the life-force of dream and imagination.

—Laura Mullen

 

A reflection on surveillance, growing up, and obsession, Shipman's The Movie My Murderer Makes: Season II is a compelling, moving, and sometimes absurd book about what it means to live the examined life in the 21st century.

—Brian Evenson

 

Through a powerful series of episodes Christopher Shipman simultaneously writes an autobiography and challenges the premise of all autobiography: that there's such a thing as a unifiedI. The brilliant light glinting in the details of these poems is met by the stark shadows cast by "my murderer," a character who like the poet is a recorder, an observer, a film-maker and a dream-maker bearing witness to the pain and awful joy of life. Enter these original poems for their language and leave with their truth.

—Rodger Kamenetz