The Occupant by Patricia Murphy

The poems in Patricia Murphy‘s The Occupant map a commonplace world turned on its head. Here, the floorboards creak with the hush of the living while the dead cause a ruckus over lunch. History makes itself glaringly apparent while flesh and blood teeters along highwires of “almost real.” Ghosts have worry lines; people don’t. Mostly, Murphy’s poems offer an uneasy path through a terrain that refuses to compromise. But don’t fret. There’s plenty of humor along the way too. Now inhale. It’s the held breath that holds the impossible, the “voice in a jar,” love.

–Martin Vest, author of Dark Night of the Sybil

Patricia Murphy‘s poems in The Occupant are quiet but their edges are fiery with a rage at living in an unsatisfactory world. Each line is laced with wit and courtesy, but her words make small cuts that sting and burn, that expose the delicate skin of desire. Her poems conspire to convince you that everything is almost okay, but they bulge with a quivering light that disrupts and threatens explosion.

–Lena Bertone, author of Letters to the Devil and Behind This Mirror