LAST RUN BEFORE SUNSET by Florence Murry

In Last Run Before Sunset, Florence Murry presents a vision of life that is familiar and dear. Her words, like those of the father in “Peeling Asparagus,” are a pure white haze that slides off the tongue. Narrative details—a father tapping a melon to test its ripeness, a husband’s jaw clicking—insinuate us in the midst of a life fully lived, wholly actualized, both gorgeous and grotesque as kelp’s “floating skin. // Flowered brown encrustations.” Here, our narrow human trajectories are “bare legs” cast against the backdrop of “brazen sky,” our shared contact a thumbprint of an old lover that lingers, as these poems linger with us, long afterward.

–Cameron Morse, author of Far Other

Florence Murry‘s poems come from such a brave heart, and find magic ways to soothe the reader to a moment of enlightened wonder. I find myself re-reading each poem, making new discoveries, whether it be the deftness of her words or the sentiment of her epiphanies. She is able to bring this off as if by magic, but on close examination, I realize this is how a great poet works, they show you a stone and you imagine the universe. Whatever has been sleeping in your heart, these poems will wake you up with wonder.
–Jack Grapes, The Naked Eye

In this collection Florence Murry applies high lyrical intensity to the unfolding events of the modern age. Taking us through the California landscape she “(initiates us)” “to hot sand and dry air” as well as to oceanic vistas, long highways, and mornings in the museum where we can stare at an artist’s rendering of the sea. Through her work illuminating the changing landscape of the state she also puts a lens on the changing landscape of her internal world as she navigates love, loss, and the upheavals of leaving one home and finding another. Both internal and external worlds are vividly rendered with a lyricism that lays bare tiny emotional shifts as the speaker watches “parched winds scour/ low mined hills & aerospace sprawl”  “on the road to that glossy edge/ among the red cinder cones and U-shaped canyons/ where the world (meets) its end.” Where we can watch her fill another journal, and can hear the voice of the artist say “I finish/I begin/I finish/I begin.”

–Tresha Faye Haefner, Founder of The Poetry Salon