Oh God Get Out Get Out - by Bill Moran (Paperback)

About the Book

Texan poet presents patient with poems that are ugly medicine: carrying death and depression out of the body, carrying us through the guts of the world.

Book Synopsis

Bill Moran's collection, Oh God Get Out Get Out, goes through us like ugly medicine.

It wades through his anxietywater- the grief, trauma, mental illness, money, addiction, deceased friends, and long EMS shifts- all pooled inside the depressed deathmetal kid, his thirsty mouth held open and up to heaven, wanting to die. It walks him and his audience through the haunted house that we are, the one we hate living in. It doesn't look away from the dark.

It kindly refuses an early exit. It keeps the death off by leaning into it. Hems it in like a band shirt, animal coat, tv show, or god we can wear when our own bodies are worn out. It eats its way out of Moran and his audience, the same way he will leave this world: wet with its Ugly, wearing the Ugly like a deathmetal shirt, carrying armfuls of Ugly out with him.

You'll hate the taste, but he swears you can drink this like medicine. When you want to disappear, it is light you can douse yourself in. When you want to get the hell out, it will clean house. It really hopes you'll stay.

Review Quotes

"Bill Moran writes from the depths.

Visceral, vulnerable and often violent - his prose like voice makes the familiar unfamiliar but some how cognizant of something you didn't know you wanted to know. Bill's willingness to cut you off at the emotional knees with out anesthetic defies the compassion of the EMT he trained to be, but his consistent, insistent persistent rhythm hides a surgical and therapeutic precision that you somehow enjoy despite the pain his truth inflicts.

Ultimately if you surrender to Moran's medicine, he will, with every blunt twist of his accusing yet plaintive knife make you better.

- Phil Griffin, visual artist and film maker (Amy Winehouse, "Back to Black" video)

"This is a book full of fractured glass & grace & grief & praise. This is a book where the elegiac is reset into a cast and a flaming sling. This is a book where the broken bone is made to laugh before a startled & disarticulated crowd. Bill Moran's debut collection Oh God Get Out Get Out is a startling first voyage into the unknown, you can practically hear the voice's urgency & heart bleeding through the text. Each new poem is an ambulance filled with sage, burning toward someone else's heaven."

-Sam Sax, author of MADNESS (Penguin, 2017), winner of The National Poetry Series

"Oh God Get Out Get Out is, more than anything, a sprawling plea with sharp edges. A conversation with God about fear, geography, vices, and forgiveness. Bill Moran's ability to shake the most out of a story is evident, in Louisiana, in dive bars, in hospitals. This is a book of poems as much as it is a book of prayers. Moran, in this work, crafts deep well of healing that we can all look into and see our own faces looking back up at us. Breathless imagery, a fast-moving car that stops right before it drives you off of the cliff. Indeed, as he says: Let me go to glory in a bowling alley, Lord. Let it look like how I lived: all aesthetic."

-Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, poet and author of "The Crown Ain't Worth Much" (Button Poetry, 2016), essayist, and cultural critic

About the Author

Bill Moran is a performance poet and former medic from Houston, TX. He is a two-time Austin Poetry Slam Champion, and has an MFA Poetry degree from Louisiana State University. He has toured regularly since 2011, performing and teaching throughout the UK, Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, and the US. He is the director of education for arts and education non-profit Iconoclast Artists, and teaches creative writing to underserved youth throughout Houston and Galveston.