Rich Murphy's Practitioner Joy is the poet's confrontation with his practice as a poet and, at least in part, his inevitable death. When outside Plato's Cave, capitalism's crisis horizon threatens with precarious neoliberalism, Wendy Brown's "every conduct is economic conduct," cyber algorithms and Shoshana Zuboff's "I once was mine; now I am theirs," and Yuval Noah Harari's and Stephen Hawking's "Homo Deus" (a new species of humans from the loins of the wealthy only), prophetic voices are needed in an effort to counter and perhaps change the narrative's and the future's direction. This collection of poems attempts to do just that. It is an alternative voice offering a way forward.