To call Erin Murphy’s Swoon: New and Selected Poems a tome is to begin to properly praise it. Its two-hundred-ninety-five pages contain work from her ten full-length poetry books, and new poems. The books are presented in date order, and comprise, remarkably, a time-span of only twenty-two years whereby she moves with ease and expertise through ideas and sensations, personae and varied poetic use of narrative, lyrical forms and rhyme. During that time she has served as a a Professor of English at Penn State-Altoona and was recently named the 2026-27 Penn State laureate. She also is the poetry editor of the Summerset Review.
Murphy’s debut collection, The Science of Desire, already demonstrated her prodigious range. Included within is a poem about a cat swallowing a condom, and one written in the voice of “Descartes’ Lover.” Across that collection a recurring theme is the power and vicissitudes of memory. In “Birthday Poem,” she tells herself, “that is how old I am now, old enough / to have forgotten the name of a friend / who died, died for God’s sake.” In “Theorem,” she reminds us of the connection between thinking and sensing, comparing “The shortest distance between two points” to the “split second before you sneeze” and “an arc of sunlight / teasing a kitchen window…” As it does throughout the collection, metaphor provides its own window, opening to both ideas and sensitive appreciations.
In “Hotel Bar,” from Dislocation and Other Theories, the poet builds, one shot at a time, to a wistful, climactic memory:
“I’ve done four shots only once,
that night in New Orleans
when I brushed lips with the Creole cabbie….
Back then, I was young enough
to mistake my body’s loose
intoxicated sway for a swoon.”
Murphy then deftly shifts to cultural and self-examination in “After Reading a Wealthy Woman’s Confession that she has never Changed a Bedsheet.” The poem has an epigraph from Pablo Neruda about his guilt for never having made a broom “with these hands they gave me.” Murphy goes further—not only has she not made a broom, but she hasn’t written poems about “Haitian farmers forced to eat the seeds they should plant,” or a mother making grilled cheese sandwiches for her kids with an iron. Ultimately, the poet wonders if she has “made, with these hands they gave me, a difference.” On the facing page, in the poem “Hunting Season,” she demonstrates her poetic gift in letting others speak the reality of their own difference and pain. The poem is framed around rural Pennsylvania’s famed obsession with deer hunting. Public schools are closed for the hunt, and in her college classroom, a student passes around a photo of a buck he “bagged.” The poem ends with a stark comparison:
“Beside him sits a young Black man from Queens. Last weekend,
Cops there fired fifty bullets—for no good reason—at an unarmedbridegroom, also Black. My city student studies the photo, shakes
his head. Where I come from, he says, every day is hunting season.”
Jumping to the new poems at the end of the book, we find Murphy’s poetic enthusiasm in the demi-sonnet. She is credited with inventing the form, a half-sonnet of seven lines with at least one direct or indirect rhyme, usually in its final lines. Three of her ten books —Word Problems, Assisted Living, and Taxonomies—contain only demi-sonnets. The titles of the new ones constitute an abecedarian, and their short (mostly all one word) titles bring a litany of vignettes and ideas to life. Whether writing about her parents’ divorce, her partner’s pacemaker, or a “paraplegic squirrel,” these short poems brim with wisdom and surprise. Her ability to bring lived experience and observations to the vibrant surface is matched by her talent “for yoking together two things that don’t belong as one”—a line which ends “Zeugma,” a demi-sonnet dedicated to “R. in our 36th year.”
She concludes these new demi-sonnets, and thus ends Swoon, with “Coda: Ars Poetica,” which references early post-Covid life and makes its lessons universal—and poetic:
“We are all raising a child ghost in the dark
rooms of ourselves. In the silences we say the most.”
There are a number of poems in the book about poetry and being a poet, and while this lyric is not technically that, it covers similar ground in a subtle way. That writers need silence could be just a truism, but in her writing it is another ode to, and example of, fruitful opposition. It is also not just reminiscent of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that “Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent,” but matches the fact that like her line, Wittgenstein’s is also the last in his book the Tractatus. Without any other evidence, this is likely just a notable coincidence, but it pairs well with her philosophical bent.
What isn’t coincidental is the title of her sixth book, Ancilla. The word comes from Latin, where it meant female servant, maid or slave girl. It is now used formally to refer to something auxiliary or accessory, or an aid to mastering or achieving something difficult. When used in philosophy and theology it is often translated as “handmaiden,” as in “philosophy is the handmaiden of theology,” extending its implications of subservience to these fields. Murphy’s poems demonstrate the title’s range of meaning. “Kant’s Manservant” raises issues of gender and the value of living life rather than just writing or thinking. The manservant admits to urging a friend to join Kant in his daily walk, “defying boldly your fear of speaking / in open air.” Getting more serious he reminds Kant that: “Ending a meal in laughter / will urge your bowels along but won’t / bleach your life of desire.”
His servant will do what Kant never did—get married—and:
“you will
grant me leave with pay, so that
years from now I will be here
to pour you a pint of claret, to collect
the scattered crumbs that are your words.”
“Sir, what moves you?”, the manservant asks, and Kant’s problem, according to the poet, is his failure to even begin to answer this question.
Other poems from Ancilla raise the spectre—and raise hell—about rampant sexism throughout history. Gustav Mahler’s wife Alma laments how she had to learn “to play / the scales of others’ / desires—first yours, / then our daughters’,” and that “You treat me / as you treat your / orchestra: like a lion / that must be tamed.” That the lions cannot always be tamed, and sometimes in tragically complicated circumstances, is dramatized in “Nietzsche’s Sister.” Friedrich Nietzsche was raised by women, but also infamously eviscerated them in print, as shown by the poem’s epigraph —“Man shall be educated for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior.” Nietzsche and his sister Elizabeth had a complicated relationship, and she recalls their childhood home as filled with women “who serve a boy / named for a king.” The poem, written in Elizabeth’s voice, ends with a roar, rising up from playing the “the part of mascot” to fight against the world’s oppression.
“I will scream
and stomp and kick
and cough and spit:
I will make noise.”
Among the other women who speak out in Ancilla are Nelly Bly, Frida Kahlo, and Nikola Tesla’s mother. But the last line of the poem “Postcards from Ghost Ranch” is from the mind of Maria Chabot, an aspiring writer and caretaker at Georgia O’Keefe’s residences. In her notes, Murphy tells us that Chabot was “somewhat infatuated with O’Keefe.” Written in a voice of longing and admiration, for both O’Keefe and for the landscape around them, Chabot ends with a bittersweet realization linking these loves and longings:
“I believe in the gash of light
dividing summer and fall.
But perhaps this isn’t enough.
Perhaps these words say nothing at all.”
As already evident, Murphy is not just a great writer, but a great thinker, using irony, opposition, social tension, and Word Problems to make her points. This first collection of demi-sonnets won the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, and has three titular poems, all of which end with an arresting question. The first asks “how many / hours will it take her to realize she’s / an artist, not an idiot? How many years?”; and the third wants to know, “How many fist-sized oranges does Monica / hurl at the man on the sidewalk who / grabs her pigtail and hisses Pretty girl?” She always finds a method by which to express the vagaries—and agonies—of living in a flawed society.
Chronicles of her children and the stages of parenting and marriage are also laced throughout the collection. She moves from descriptions of a cesarean section, to reflections on how her son cannot be reduced to “some hormonal animal” because, at thirteen, he “is a poem.” She writes “My Daughter Asks if a Minute is Always a Minute” against the backdrop of hearing about a father murdering his four children, and she wants to answer her daughter with a “yes,” but has to then quickly conclude, “But sometimes it feels like years.” Later, in Fluent in Blue, the poet again pairs son and daughter poems on facing pages, identifying the pain and pangs of their aging and leaving. As her son leaves home, she recalls his warm, sticky, gummy hands as she can also “feel him slip loose.” The daughter poem’s title says it all— “18-Year-Old Daughter as Runaway Horse.” The father searches while the poet stays behind, “opening and closing the stall, / recreating sounds I hope will draw her home.” And as always, Murphy questions herself and the world about the point of it all, unable to avoid her mind’s constant probing. In “After ‘The Boating Party,’” she presents an epigraph in which Mary Cassatt declares she made a mistake “in devoting myself to art instead of having children.” Of the painting, the poet wants to know, “Is the woman gazing at the man / or beyond him?” and ultimately wonders, “Did Cassatt / make a mistake? Did I? Did you?”
Her probing becomes documentarian in Human Resources, published in 2025. The poems are all about, or in the voice of, workers or work-related issues. There is a series of Erasure poems based on various human resources manuals. One describes what many of us recognize as both an oxymoronic yet common “Policy on Clarity:”
In the poem “In Human Resources” the first and last lines sum up the reality of so many poor working environments: “In Human Resources / the weather is always / fluorescent…. In Human Resources / no one has a face.” An indication of the all-too-common incommensurability of putting her title words together.
Nearly every one of Murphy’s books has won a prize, and her poem “The Internet of Things” won the 2021 Rattle Poetry Prize as the Reader’s Choice. Its final line provides a good, if ironic, summary of this voluminous collection: “The brief / ecstatic flight of things.” I say this because, after reading it, and realizing how much she has done in twenty-two years, one has every reason to think that its content is indeed brief, and that there will be so much more to come (she’s also edited several collections, and has a new book of essays, Mother as Conjunction, out this year). As I write this, news just posted that noted author and psychiatrist Robert Coles has died at age 96. His obituary says that he taught a class at Harvard called “The Literature of Social Reflection” which jokingly became known as “Guilt 105.” Well, I think that Coles’ class is matched, and more, in the poetry of Erin Murphy. Her body of work collected in Swoon: New and Selected Poems is worthy of the title “Literature of Reflection…period,” and readers may be inclined to call it “Joy, Guilt and Everything Else 101.”
