Overview

"Barbara E. Murphy's compelling The Unfinished Family comes to terms with the notion that families can ever be ""finished.' The poems in this brave and provocative collection explore the impulses of duty and loyalty, love and fear and compulsion for perfection as the speaker comes to embrace the mistakes that are inevitable in every family. These poems are as honest as they are hopeful in their insistence that we return again and again to the messy work of being with our people and starting again."

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9781950063925

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"In The Unfinished Family, Barbara Murphy offers a master class on the compressed narrative and the withheld detail. Whether she turns a discerning, critical eye on her birth-family -a troubled father, a mother born into ""the wrong era, wrong marriage, wrong life"" -or her own made family she brings a wealth of memorable phrases, smart insights, and emotional yearning as well as an empathetic eye and forgiving mind that ""lets a little light in too."" -Neil Shepard, author of The Book of Failures Part of our human beauty is that we live in a state of being unfinished. This is why memory is so powerful. Barbara Murphy's exquisite, beautiful poems are a series of finely etched portraits that enact how our moments accumulate into meaning as they move toward another world we will never know yet help create. Muscular, lyric language and an agile form makes these powerful poems tap us on the shoulder and awaken us from our delirium and into the transcendent. Murphy's poems show us how personal history and time intersect leaving behind a memory that never vanishes. These poems claim life and life claims these poems. This book is a treasure. -Elizabeth A.I. Powell, author of Atomizer Barbara Murphy's The Unfinished Family is haunted by the archetypal ghost of a perfect family against which the speaker holds memories-brilliantly precise and unequivocally rendered-and finds them wanting. Yet, the honesty, bravery and fidelity with which she acknowledges her disappointments burnish these poems with love, humor and pathos. We should read her. -Nancy Mitchell, author of The Out of Body Shop"

Author Information

Barbara E. Murphy's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming injournals including Green Mountains Review, Threepenny Review, Barrow Street, and New England Review. She is a recipient of aVermont Arts Council Fellowship and twice-nominated for aPushcart Prize. Murphy served as a faculty member at the NewEngland Young Writers Conference and is a board member ofSundog Poetry. A collection of her poems, Almost Too Muchwas published by Cervena Barva Press in 2015.Her essays and reviews have been published in several venuesincluding The New York Times, Plume Poetry, Full GrownPeople, and Green Mountains Review. She lives and writes inBurlington Vermont.

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