Hemming Flames Now Available

Patricia Colleen MurphyWe at Superstition Review are very pleased to announce that our founding editor, Patricia Colleen Murphy, recently had her first collection of poetry, Hemming Flames, published by Utah State University Press. Hemming Flames was chosen by Stephen Dunn as the winner of the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award.

 

Hemming FlamesThroughout 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.

 

Patricia has two upcoming readings:

Thursday September 1st at 7 pm she will be reading with Sarah Vap at Changing Hands Tempe.

Thursday September 22nd at 7 pm she will be reading with Sarah Vap and Dexter Booth at ASU’s Hayden Library.

 

On August 20th, Four Chambers Press held a book release for Hemming Flames. If you missed it, you can watch it here.

 

The book is available from Amazon. For more information about the book, please visit its website.

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