Lung Hours

Jessica Purdy's award-winning collection, Lung Hours, grows from the space of Sylvia Plath's "purple wilderness," where night is a living world. "Things sing in the stubborn trees," claws of a coyote whip into a sleeping human mouth, rocks have a scent, the woods-inviting, disturbing-are never far. The "attic of the mind" is a place of jumbled objects and intentions, where "Everything is moving except you." In this Jungian playground, the day's work follows the dreamer into night. These poems are a doing and an undoing, concluding, finally, "You're absurd being human." And yet, Purdy endears us to the human experience with poignant portrayals of parenting, partnering, awaiting diagnoses, and even starting-in mid-life-to run. Reader and speaker alike are reassured, "nothing can harm me"-"the house cannot burn."

-Mary Buchinger

  Author of There is only the sacred and the desecrated

Jessica Purdy's Lung Hours is a journey through a woman's landscape of childhood to motherhood to middle age, with its new and full moons, its winter solstices, milkweeds, seeds that she as a non-gardener can still push into dirt. This book is one of children encountering monsters, of dreams and becoming a powerful monster "She-Hulk" herself, of epistolary poems, and in the end a promise of spring and then returning us to the end of October, when we know there will be another cold winter in her northern climate. With her eloquent language and rich sensory details, Purdy captures both the cruelty and beauty of nature and our bodies and how they can still be full of joy, even in and because of their vulnerability.

-Kika Dorsey

  Author of Occupied and Good Ash