Hemming Flames
Subtitle
Poems
Volume 19 of the May Swenson Poetry Award Series, 2016
Throughout this haunting first collection, Patricia Colleen Murphy shows how familial mental illness, addiction and grief can render even the most courageous person helpless. With depth of feeling, clarity of voice, and artful conflation of surrealist image and experience, she delivers vivid descriptions of soul-shaking events with objective narration, creating psychological portraits contained in sharp, bright language and image. With Plathian relentlessness, "Hemming Flames" explores the deepest reaches of family dysfunction through highly imaginative language and lines that carry even more emotional weight because they surprise and delight. In landscapes as varied as an Ohio back road, a Russian mental institution, a Korean national landmark, and the summit of Kilimanjaro, each poem sews a new stitch on the dark tapestry of a disturbed suburban family’s world.
The May Swenson Poetry Award is an annual competition named for May Swenson, one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of 50 years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in her hometown of Logan, Utah.
Bio
Patricia Murphy is a principal lecturer at Arizona State University, where she founded the literary magazine Superstition Review. In spring 2017 she won the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts Outstanding Teacher Award. Murphy's book of poems "Hemming Flames" won the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award, judged by Stephen Dunn, and the 2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Award.
Praise for this book
The curious title of Patricia Murphy's wonderfully disturbing 'Hemming Flames' doesn’t become clear to us until the last poem in the book. ... As if the act of writing itself is an attempt to hem what can’t easily be hemmed.
Stephen Dunn Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
class="p1">“These are searing reports from the far side of the human dimension, acts of pure familial survival — charged, compelling, complex. We read searching with the speaker for an answer to the singular question one poem poses, ‘Where are you, gravity?’ These are hard-felt, intimate, and genuine.
Alberto Ríos Poet laureate of Arizona
