Michelle Murphy
Disheveled Histories
Wet Cement Press
New Release
Disheveled Histories
(April 2024)
"The poems in Michelle Murphy’s Disheveled Histories both echo the dishevelment and bring order to family history, personal history, the natural history of the body, and the land on which it resides, where “[t]hese rapids spit out / trailer hitch, tangled lures, / dime-size locket, crumbled jacket,” and where “even a butterfly / can anger God.” Murphy often writes in series and sequences, reflecting that instinct to structure the disarray of experience, particularly traumatic loss, via language, the very definition of lyric poetry. “I’ll comb back your hair, / spit that unruly cowlick / into place,” she writes, enacting the intimacy of such work, in which “haiku takes its place / among tumbleweeds.” Murphy uncovers a sort of defiant eternity in her poems, though not the easy kind. Regarding a brother, who takes his own life by leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge, she writes: “Even your father, his / history, moth-holed / almost laughs when / your urn refuses / to sink under the waves. / Nothing ends.” Michelle Murphy has written a beautiful, gutsy, and restorative collection."
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---Diane Seuss, author of six books of poetry including Modern Poetry: Poems and frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press), and winner of the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.
$14.95/Hardcover
80 pages / 5" x 8"
ISBN: 979-8-9883840-2-1
Distributed by Ingram
Pub Date: 4/15/2024
Cover Art by Sheridan Jones
IG: @the.sheridanjones
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Disheveled Histories probes the enigmas of our existence by setting them against the clarity of a primer (see Murphy’s series of “how to” poems). Murphy knows that simple directives and rules cannot guide us through an unreasonable world with its disheveled histories—its gun violence, suicides, wildfires, and perpetual wars. Within a familial, rural landscape, she weaves musical paths for us to navigate the innate discord of violence and loss.
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—Martine Bellen, author of An Anatomy of Curiosity (Mad Hat)
Michelle Murphy’s moving and beautifully crafted poems remind me of Fanny Howe. They often inhabit moments just before loss, and in its immediate aftermath. A brother is lost to suicide, a mother to dementia, a forest to wildfire. She weaves these losses into what endures and finds harmony. If time could be stopped, this would be how, by capturing the ephemeral and saving it as language.
—Amanda Holmes, author of I Know Where I Am When I’m Falling (Oak Tree Press), and poetry editor for the Washington Independent Review of Books.