New Poets | Short Books | Volume IV
Poetry by
Abby E. Murray, Jesse S. Fourmy, and Karen Holman
Series Editor, Marvin Bell
About the Book
Poetry Anthology | ISBN 978-0-9844510-2-9
$16.95 US | $18.95 Canada
5.5 x 8.5 inches | 84 pages
This fourth volume of the Lost Horse Press New Poets | Short Books series offers three strong voices, each with a personal brand of courage. Their lives are as different from one another as can be, and their sensibilities are very much their own, yet in practicing the art of poetry they share something too mysterious and vital ever to be replaced by a new technology. That is because poetry is a primary and, one might argue, primal manifestation of the life force itself. All of our brilliant inventions notwithstanding, what life feels like remains inside us. Here are three poets, each of whose personal language is part of that richness we cannot do without.
—Marvin Bell
Excerpts
From Me & Coyote
by Abby E. Murray
We are sitting in the parking lot
of the bakery on Main Street
and we are hungry, so hungry
all we have planned for the
rest of the day is talking about food.
I am wondering if paper is more
nutritious than I know
and whether or not I could eat
a book slowly until payday.
From Last Night’s Fire & the Dwindling Embers of Evolution
by Jesse
S. Fourmy
If heaven was a verb and I told you,
I heaven you,
I would mean I embrace you, wholly,
as if inside a shell.
From Welcoming in the Starry Night of the Lightning Bees
by Karen Holman
No one to greet you
on your side,
no one beside you now
your breath
evaporating like alcohol.
Come back
to
the dandelions.
I blow into your ear
to make you dream of wind.
Reviews
Me & Coyote by Abby Murray
April 12, 2010
by Robert Peake
When I ordered Abby Murray’s new chapbook, “Me & Coyote,” I initially forgot that it came as part of the Lost Horse Press New Poets Series, the fourth in a series of book-length collections made up of three chapbooks by three different authors. The other two poets in this book, Jesse Fourmy and Karen Holman–also fellow students from the Pacific University MFA program–are both poets of distinctive voice and character. Their work deserves its own attention and careful reading.
But tonight I want to write about Abby’s poetry, because reading Abby Murray makes me want to be a better poet. By “better” I mean more wild, fierce, and free. Life can drive you crazy, if you let it. Health problems in the family and pressures at work have been leading me up to the brink. How refreshing, then, to read poems that regularly swan-dive off the edge, with such panache.
A poem like “Barnacle’s Son” convinces me, completely, that even if a man can’t be born from a rough sea creature, it ought to be possible. And within the language of the poem, it is. Equally convincing is the poem “How I Love You,” whose lines taper down and down, constricting on the final phrase, in all its tough rightness: “I love you more than / an iron fence / loves her / house.” And when “They Took Her Away in a Birdcage,” my face wanted to smile and frown all at once.
But Abby’s poems are not all mixed emotion and magical realism. She can hold focus on difficult topics as unflinchingly as a poet like Sharon Olds. Abby does just this in “Bones,” written at the bedside of a wounded soldier, giving us “the explosion in slow motion:”
crescent moons and teardrops of shrapnel
spiraling up the leg from ankle to groin like
morning glories curling round a fencepost.
My favorite poems make me want to thank a poet for just being most fully themselves. So, thank you, Abby, for being Abby.
I’m off to howl at the moon.