Between Belonging and Alienation: A Review of Nina Murray’s Minor Heresies (2020, Heartland Review Press)

In 2013, during a meeting in the Situation Room to discuss Syria, President Barack Obama tersely responded to his then U.N. Ambassador, Samantha Power, who was pushing for a stronger U.S. intervention: “We have all read your book, Samantha.” Power, who has been described as an unrelenting idealist in her humanitarianism, penned the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002), in which she argues for an America of interventions: a nation that observes its perceived moral calling to not only condemn genocidal actions abroad, but to take it upon itself to combat and prevent future genocides. It is with this exchange between Power and President Obama that poet Nina Murray begins her most recent collection, Minor Heresies (2020, Heartland Review Press), which she includes as an epitaph, thus orienting her reader at the axis of two contrasting national imaginaries—the messianic America of noble-minded mediation and that of violent neocolonial and military power. 

For Murray, it seems that these competing national narratives conjure powerful feelings of both belonging and alienation, and what it means to observe these phenomena as an immigrant lies at the heart of her own poetic intervention. Born and raised in Ukraine’s western city of Lviv, Murray moved to the United States in 2003 to attend graduate school in creative writing. Murray’s poetry is intimately shaped by the complexities of experiences and identities she holds, not only as an émigré writer, but also through her work as a literary translator and her time in the U.S. Foreign Service, where she has served as a diplomat in Lithuania, Russia, and Canada. Moreover, it is from these intersecting identities, languages, and knowledges that a collection like Minor Heresies emerges, and Murray harnesses the plasticity and potential of language to both texture and mediate her worlds. Her earlier works include poetry collections, Alcestis in the Underworld (2019) and Minimize Considered (2018). She has also translated extensively from both Ukrainian and Russian, including the work of Ukraine’s foremost contemporary feminist writer, Oksana Zabuzhko, both her prodigious novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (2013) and her new short story collection Your Ad Could Go Here (2020), as well as Peter Aleshkovsky’s Stargorod (2013) and Fish: A History of One Migration (2010). 

The title itself, Minor Heresies, speaks to Murray’s disruptive, iconoclastic poetics, within which she attentively punctures deeply held beliefs while also exploring her own lived experiences as a foreigner in the U.S. However, the “heretical,” in this case, surfaces through subtlety, often working through the poet’s observation of others, both within and between the natural and “built” worlds. For instance, in “the view”: “a shuttling loom/bodies in serene industry/of incremental betterment/of lives—/a dog at heel/a well-oiled bike/the slow churn of growing compost piles.”

Or in “Cicadas respond to Billy Collins,” she muses, “the indifferent blessings of sun and the rain/but with all our acts as preordained/as you remembering car keys/the coffee that starts your day/what else could we make but/this—our obedient/martial sawing.” Humans, she proposes, are not so different from insects or other animals: we are equally managed by our routines, and our habits, in a sense, live us. 

The beauty of Minor Heresies lies in Murray’s observations the everyday, yet through her description we find a rich, even meditative, familiarity. For instance, in some poems, Murray positions herself as both speaker and subject, such as in “commute, november,” where she, again, straddles the line between worlds; “geese/in a loosely-threaded flock/traverse the regularly-windowed slab/of the Pentagon/a muscular/propulsive mass/while we are held/in our bus seats/conveyed to work/in opposite direction—/and thus observed/appear suspended/in each other’s worlds." In her “April, birthday wish,” she muses, “i wish for a poem/in which a small thing happens.” She then articulates these “small things”—a “bay horse,” “magnolia trees,” “loopy handwriting,” “a friend from the north”—all of which seem to be the objects of memory and of the speaker’s dreams, as she weaves in and out of these ephemeral spaces. Perhaps most striking is Murray’s playing with alliteration throughout several poems in the collection. For instance in “C is for consumption,” she writes, “carbon/crustacean/conifer/corvid/cut/cornered/cauldroned/calcified.” In “N,” the poem’s meaning is shaped through negation: “not a drill/non-essential non-excepted/non-exempt/non-immigrant/naturalized/non-native/non-violent non-binary.” In a sense, she attunes her reader to the poetic query of citizenship, and particularly diasporic citizenship—to what do owe (or not own) the spaces in which we find ourselves, be they political, national, or cultural. What do they owe us? 

To return to the exchange between Obama and Power (who is herself an Irish immigrant), I would add that it is very easy to advocate for the “America of intervention” when your body, your life, the subjectivities you hold, are not the objects of violence (at least not in the way Black, Brown, indigenous, and Muslim peoples’ have been). It is very easy to laud the moral logic of intervention when you overlook its potential to reproduce colonialism and ethnocentrism. As I write this, against the backdrop of a pandemic and social isolation, the “America” I speak of is reckoning with its own original sins: settler colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery. The optimist in me hopes that this moment will be deeply transformative, one that, to borrow from Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, allows us to know where we live in its rawest forms, in all of its ugliness and cruelty, and with that, to begin to imagine living elsewhere. The power of the poet lies in their articulation of this “knowing,” as well as the imagining of an “elsewhere”—not necessarily toward the utopic, but more incisively, by sitting with the present. In “anywhere, now,” the final poem in Minor Heresies, Murray’s speaker observes what remains when the “human” disappears from state power: “in the short hours of the morning/a riderless horse/drinks from the fountain in Liberty Square/he is wearing full riot gear/only the street dogs/and the jet-lagged poet/see him.” To this end, Murray’s work in Minor Heresies troubles these spaces of belonging and alienation through her poetic vivisection of the everyday, and in so doing, carries her reader toward possibility and futurity.

Nina Murray’s Minor Heresies can be purchased on Heartland Review Press’ website
Reviewed by Sandra Joy Russell