Swenson Poetry Award

Patricia Colleen Murphy

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781607325529
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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 fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in her hometown of Logan, Utah.

Acknowledgments

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My sincere gratitude to the editors of the following literary magazines where these poems first appeared, sometimes in previous versions.

The Adirondack Review	“After Rumi’s Birdwings”
The American Poetry Review	“Night Falling, Czechoslovakia” and “Letter from the Psych Ward, Hospital Kashenko”
Arcadia Magazine	“Songs in Kiswahili”
Armchair/Shotgun	“XVIII^e Arrondissement”
The Baltimore Review	“Dad’s Last Entrechat”
Belleview Literary Review	“Reading Sexton in Phuket”
Bluestem Magazine	“Cutlass Ciera”
Burnside Review	“Murmur”
Cimarron Review	“On Being Born”
Cleaver	“The Birth of No”
Cobalt Review	“Losing Our Milk Teeth”
Cutbank	“Flatline” and “Liminal”
Diode	“Arch on a Rung” and “Edison’s Medicine”
A Dozen Nothing	“Everyone Is Eviscerated”
Evansville Review	“Not Having Them”
The Greensboro Review	“Lunatic Years”
Gulf Coast	“Why I Burned Down Namdaemun Gate”
Hobart	“Scrotum and Bone” and “Bulb”
Kalliope	“How the Body Moves”
The Madison Review	“The Princess of Creeping,” “What Flickers,” and “The Linger Museum”
The Massachusetts Review	“Crave”
Natural Bridge	“Perennial”
Nebraska Review	“Song of a Misanthrope” and “Take the Late Flight”
NewSouth	“Crushings”
North American Review	“Rank Bitch”
Prick of the Spindle	“Where Are You, Gravity?”
Quarterly West	“Is It the Sea You Hear in Me?”
Seattle Review	“My Brother, Hoarding”
Sixth Finch	“Halloween in the Tank”
Smartish Pace	“My Trifecta of Offenses”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Stephen Dunn
• Losing Our Milk Teeth
• Bridges All Over the Room
• My Brother, Hoarding
• How the Body Moves
• Throwing the Proper Tantrums
• XVIIIe Arrondissement
• Immolate
• Cutlass Ciera
• Kitten
• My Armamentarium
• Is It the Sea You Hear in Me?
• Good Morning, Mediocrity
• Meet the Author
• Night Falling, Czechoslovakia
• Edison’s Medicine
• Why I Burned Down Namdaemun Gate
• High Hopes, Bad Habits
• Turkish Get-Ups
• Feeding Peeping Tom
• Scrotum and Bone
• The Year of Our Comorbidity
• The Princess of Creeping
• Reading Sexton in Phuket
• Bulb
• Murmur
• The Birth of No
• Midnight at Orca Cannery
• Letter from the Psych Ward, Hospital Kashenko
• My Mittelschmerz
• Arch on a Rung
• This Is Not a Pipe
• Song of a Misanthrope
• Lunatic Years
• Halloween in the Tank
• Incommunicado
• From The Book of Attacks
• Songs in Kiswahili
• Break in the Chain
• Flatline
• How I Learned That Everyone Is Ridiculous
• Where Are You, Gravity?
• Everyone is Eviscerated
• Liminal
• Memory as Diary
• Take the Late Flight
• On Being Orphaned
• After Rumi’s Birdwings
• Crave
• What Flickers
• Perennial
• Rank Bitch
• Dad’s Last Entrechat
• Crushings
• Bizarre Part
• On Being Born
• Climbing
• Not Having Them
• The Linger Museum
• My Trifecta of Offenses
• With a Whimper
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author