POETRY BOOKS BY SHEILA E. MURPHY - DETAILS
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Toccatas in the Key of D
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Each of these 72 numbered poems is a toccata, literally
touch piece.
Syllables become strings on an instrument that sings
conceptual music alive within a vivid and timeless
present tense. Each taut passage in this 2010
publication applies a disciplined
magic that extends the spirit and approach initiated in
earlier work by Sheila Murphy:
With House
Silence (Stride Press, 1987),
Teth (Chax
Press, 1991), and
Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press,
2003).
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Collected Chapbooks Click
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"Sheila E. Murphy is indeed a virtuoso bird, one
who takes flight through language at the slightest
provocation, carrying her readers with her on long
poetic journeys. These poems are about linguistic
experience, about music on the page and in the head,
about ideas approached from surprising angels and made
anew, about renewal and revival. Over the last
twenty-five years I have continually migrated toward
Sheila’s approachable, lyrical and engaging experiments,
basking in the sun-drenched visions she has gathered and
made from the worlds and words about her. Collected
Chapbooks is an overdue delight, a tribute and a
publishing event.”
-- Rupert Loydell
“For three decades, Sheila E. Murphy has been one
of the master architects of American syntax. Those who
have read her poems only in magazines and chapbooks have
no idea of the scope, the scale and the depth of her
work. For those readers, this collection will be a
revelation. This is a great book!”
-- Ron Silliman
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Tommy and Neil
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“Every male creature on Earth is
Sheila E. Murphy’s brother, & each female her sister; &
she loves you, unconditionally. She loves language &
nothing in existence is inanimate with her feeling
carefully placed inside it, hearts of things, memory
beating, a Zen spirituality washing through all thought
cleansing the world of silence & chaos. Biology aside,
ignore the genes. Sheila is my sister.”
-- Ron Androla
“When I see Sheila Murphy’s name
on a magazine cover I turn to her work at once. The
eagerness is to see what she’s done with language. Poet
talks of the glimpses you get at the corner of the
mind’s eye, just before sleep – almost impossible to
catch in words. Sheila gets them over and over. More wit
and joy find their way into her utterances than in whole
books by writers who look at their subject (like a bowl
of cream), label it (kitty), then start to write. Ms.
Murphy writes as if the pen is a dagger clenched in her
teeth. She’s made – out of nothing, it seems – a kind of
writing never wholly private, as personal as the inside
of your mind or the bottom of your tongue. There is no
more important writer writing American English.”
-- Gerald Burns
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Letters to Unfinished J Click to purchase
Winner of The Gertrude Stein Poetry Award, 2001. Selected
by Dennis Phillips for the 2001 Gertrude Stein Poetry
Award, Letters to
Unfinished J. is comprised of 66 “letters,” composed
from 1994-1996, in which poet Sheila Murphy further
establishes herself as a major author of the prose poem.
Her text is equally at home in depths and surfaces that
conjoin as she excavates and questions at multiple
levels. Unexpected images, perceptions, and word
combinations emerge, resulting often in political and
societal critiques. Each of the letters is tightly
composed, highly concentrated, and fraught with motion.
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Falling in Love Falling in Love
with You Syntax: Selected and New Poems
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“Welcome
indeed is this major selection. Murphy combines an
extraordinary level of literary experimentation, daring,
and playfulness with an absolute honesty, clarity of
vision, intimacy, and comprehensiveness in one of the
strongest, clearest, and most distinctive voices writing
in English today. . . Murphy’s poetry comes from the
heart and mind, and from the whole of experience with
its griefs and delights . . . Murphy is a poet who can
use some of the most daring techniques around and show
the feeling and consciousness they imply.”
-- John M. Bennett
Sheila
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ContinuationsClick
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Douglas Barbour and Sheila E. Murphy
Across great distances and a panorama shaped by
words, poets Douglas Barbour and Sheila E. Murphy began
writing in collaboration. Tapped to technology’s dance
across paper, with thoughts like bright colours coursing
across screens, Continuations emerged as the product of
a new creator, a ‘third individual,’ who writes
differently from either poet. Words shapeshifted and
poets transformed, Continuations is an intriguing
addition to the growing field of collaborative poetry in
North American literature.
“The strength
of this book is in its quick-change artistry, the
sensation of flux that is
continuous, and capable at any moment of erupting into
epiphany or surprise.”
-- Boo Borson
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Concentricity
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CONCENTRICITY is a daring and distinctive book, yet its
playfulness never fails to shine through. "Sheila
Murphy's poetry operates in mercurial registers that
demonstrate an aliveness to risk and
experimentation.Murphy is argus-eyed, and her
invigilation invokes a kind of spiritual exercise. She
performs her poetic work as a meditative attention to
the "tone complexion" of her language, which emerges in
a "promenade of images" that open and transform in front
of us. Sheila Murphy balances her quiet attention to the
music of language with a sharp observation of the social
text."
-- John Tritica
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Quaternity Click
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Scott Glassman and Sheila E. Murphy
Quaternity asks the reader to trust in words—the
word itself and not what it supposedly signifies. For
the word itself can...
be a musical note and can suffice (more than
suffice!) that certain combinations sing. The dictionary
bows to Scott Glassman and Sheila Murphy's seductive
diction: "No curve to infinity can mimic bells."
-- Eileen Tabios
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Teth
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“Sheila Murphy compels repetition,
invites it, precisely because what she repeats is an
action, the sitting down with the mind alive to all
that’s around (and to a human mind much of ‘what’s
around’ will sound abstract but is as present as the
pepper) as here her ‘Impala parked halfway in drive’
becomes as though about yet another Transcendental as in
Emerson emblem. Em as in Murphy. Thoreau would like it
that her refrigerator ‘transforms/poached pear into
fiberglass’ and yet these are very much the act of
writing, not moving
toward
privileged moments . . . To do this ingeniously is the
thing, the knack, the project . . .”
From the Preface by Gerald Burns.
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Sad Isn't
the Color of the Dream
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“Murphy is
a poet in love, not only with language, and all of its
possible transmutations, but with all the music in
various forms she employs contain. And what a strange
diversity of music this vision encompasses . . . Sheila
Murphy is a poet of wide range and ability whose work
fascinates . . . a poet I look forward to be challenged
by and to reading again.”
Alan Catlin
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A
Clove of Gender
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“She is a writer of depth, sophistication and of
prolific output. She has developed her technique while
retaining a beautiful clarity and precision. She has
been concerned with the problems of balancing spiritual
and material life. Music features strongly in her life
and writing. She has a fine sense of irony and an
ability to provide space for the ready by being
self-effacing.”
Reviewed in
Contraflow
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Green
Tea with Ginger
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“Green Tea with Ginger continues a
work that engages the art of innovation in American
poetry. Sheila’s poetic gifts issue from an enormous
range of skills and tireless energy. This book
contributes centrally to a life’s work that is prolific
, exciting, and reliable.”
John Tritica
“’It will be summer for a lifetime’, Murphy’s book
informs us. And continues in poem after poem of warm
pastoral thoughts. The reader hears a poet in
conversation with herself, inviting us to accompany her
on a peaceful journey. This mode is rare in contemporary
poetry, it should be pointed out. A poem’s title informs
us: ‘All I ever write are lovelet-.’ These poems were
created from an inward glow that any sensitive reader
will share in with delight.”
Peter Ganick
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Incessant
Seeds Click to purchase
Murphy has used 14-syllable lines in 14-line units per
page, to discover ‘Incessant Seeds.’ Rule-based
composition leads the mind to find and gather
like-sounding, like-shaped arrangements of words or
syllables. It became clear that the more the determined
method, the more in-sync the writer became with the
vibratory pattern as a liberating process.
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Proof
of Silhouettes Click to purchase
“It’s the secret, ongoing life of
the mind that one finds expressed in these beautiful,
exquisitely crafted poems.”
Jack Foley
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How to
Spell the Sound of Everything Click to purchase
Miekal and Sheila E. Murphy
A confabulation of wit and wonder from Sheila E. Murphy
and Miekal And, How to Spell the Sound of Everything
takes you on a roller coaster ride through the
time-space of the two authors. As they put it, "Themes
dissolve emission prayerclouds."
- K.S. Ernst
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The Stuttering of Wings Click
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“Sheila Murphy’s prose poems are pure jazz—poetry
riffing in joyous patterns that you can shake your head
and tap your feet to and lose yourself in the dizzy
trumpet mouth of language.”
Poetry Quarterly Review
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Permutoria: Visio-Textual
Art
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K.S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy
“In
this selection, Ernst and Murphy merge esthetics and
multiply possibilities, creating a stunning mix of
verbo-visual expression for the eye and the mind behind
that eye.”
Geof Huth
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The Case of the Lost Objective
(Case) Click
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This vibrant collection of new work by Sheila E. Murphy
encompasses both lineated and prose poems. In addition,
for the first time, selected prints of Murphy’s visual
poetry, some included in private collections and in
gallery exhibitions, are presented in book format. The
range of work within these pages attests to the
versatility and depth of this poet, and invites being
read aloud to reveal the full range of perception and
innovative use of language.
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Parsings
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Experimental, 161-page, ongoing poem by Murphy,
composed in 2008 and first appearing in Finland.
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