Erin Murphy is the author of three collections of poetry: Dislocation and Other Theories (Word Press, 2008); Too Much of This World (Mammoth Books, 2008), winner of the Anthony Piccione Poetry Prize; and Science of Desire (Word Press, 2004), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize for the best poetry book of 2004. With Todd Davis, she is co-editor of Making Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets (forthcoming from the State University of New York Press). Her awards include a $5,000 2006 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the 2006 Foley Poetry Award, the 2004 National Writers' Union Poetry Award judged by Donald Hall, and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and have appeared in dozens of journals and in several anthologies, including 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins (Random House, 2005). She is assistant professor of English and creative writing at the Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College.
SAMPLE POEMS
CONTACT ERIN: ErinMurphy@psu.edu
Reviews
"Erin Murphy is a sly, funny, clear-eyed poet whose poems close with the satisfying ringing sound of deft ironies sliding into place. She has the courage of her idiosyncracies, a pitch-perfect ear, and the confidence to probe the more tender hypocrisies of our culture. It's just like her to tell us something we didn't know we knew. Well, now we know. This is a marvelous book." --Lee Upton
"A sassy domesticity informs these poems--let's call them Emily Post-modern--and a savvy intellect sifts each line so that the language becomes, in Emerson's phrase, 'doubly significant.' Underscored with humor and ravening self-consciousness, the poems' true subject is not only the burden of desire, how 'wanting always // leaves you, always / leaves you wanting,' but its brilliant and spiritually rousing counterpart: 'If only someone / would lift us up, polish us, see us. See us shine.' Erin Murphy has crafted here a volume both dazzling and transcendent in its deceptively homespun articulations." --Michael Waters
"Culturally savvy, mordantly ironic, bemused and poignant, the poems of Erin Murphy's Dislocation and Other Theories deliver their insights with 'back-story, anecdote, and verisimilitude' as clearly and concisely crafted as radio dispatches for a planet slightly off its axis. 'What else have you misread?' she asks herself when the nature worshipper on the tow bridge turns out to be merely littering. When the war hero rescuing his bride from a high-rise hotel fire loses his grip, Murphy interrogates the nuances of the Latinate prefix for the space between selves that makes communication possible...and also buries it altogether. Deflected expectations, sudden shifts in identity, and unbidden intimations both of mortality and of capacity for transformation keep the inhabitants of these poems perpetually in motion. In a world full of dislocations, Murphy implies, we are all mangoes out of season, but we recognize ourselves in the hope of 'dormant brilliance' awakening in these poems." --Carolyne Wright
“It’s the mixture of verbal sensuousness and quick intelligence that appeals most strongly to me in these vivid poems by Erin Murphy. There’s something intrepid, honest, insistent in her ability to negotiate at speed between facts and feelings. Anchored often in family, her imagination can float out on currents of edgy, idiosyncratic, individual revelation. Alert to the language itself, she is always physically mindful of its meanings, its play of possibilities. Behind the wry humor, there is a decent, sympathetic love for the ordinary stuff of the world, for how ‘apples [are] polished like memories.’ She is like that man ‘working/ his garden like the day itself depends/ on this season’s tulips: blood-red, short-lived.’ A striking first book, Science of Desire is in its own way a book of knowledge.” --Eamon Grennan
“As she slips into and out of other lives as well as her own, Erin Murphy combines the cool precision of a scientist and an historian’s eye for pattern and detail with the passionate involvement of a wife, a daughter, a mother, and a lover. She also possesses an artist’s ability to draw back from the experience of the moment, having ‘learn[ed] to see/what needs to be seen.’ Reading these poems is like plunging into a cold stream: They leave you awake, alive, and shivering with recognition.” --Sue Ellen Thompson