Each ballad is an ode to the sea and the men who dedicate their lives to it.

In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were engaged in a top secret experiment. This was not, as many assume, the creation of a book of poetry. A book emerged, to be sure--the landmark Lyrical Ballads. But in Murder Ballads, David John Brennan posits that the two poets were in fact pursuing far different ends: to birth from their poems a singular, idealized Poet. Despite their success, such Frankensteinian pursuits proved rife with consequence for the men. Doubts and questions plagued them: What does it mean to be a poet if your work is not your own? Who is best fit to lay claim to a parcel of poetic property that was collaboratively crafted and bequeathed to a fictitious Poet? How does one kill a Poet born of one's own hand? Blending critical examination with jocular playlets-in-verse featuring the authors of the two books in baffled conversation, Murder Ballads reopens a 200-year-old cold case that never received a proper investigation: Who was the first true Author of Lyrical Ballads, and how exactly did he die?

Poetry. "Rather than introspection, sensationalism, or mere entertainment, remembering becomes an act of engagement, one that propels the poet toward a fierce intellectual and moral reckoning. And we in turn are held rapt by the lyric enactments of this poet who takes dangerous materials into his hands; who stubbornly pulls at the poisonous sumac obscuring a furnace's ruins; who probes old wound, transfiguring them into new patterns. MURDER BALLADS is wondrous and essential reading, a compelling debut" Jane Satterfield."