Hemming Flames

by Patricia Colleen Murphy, Stephen Dunn (Foreword)

Throughout this haunting first collection, Patricia Colleen Murphy shows how familial mental illness, addiction, and grief can render even the most courageous person helpless. With depth of feeling, clarity of voice, and artful conflation of surrealist image and experience, she delivers vivid descriptions of soul-shaking events with objective narration, creating psychological portraits contained in sharp, bright language and image. With Plathian relentlessness, Hemming Flames explores the deepest reaches of family dysfunction through highly imaginative language and lines that carry even more emotional weight because they surprise and delight. In landscapes as varied as an Ohio back road, a Russian mental institution, a Korean national landmark, and the summit of Kilimanjaro, each poem sews a new stitch on the dark tapestry of a disturbed suburban family’s world.

The May Swenson Poetry Award is an annual competition named for May Swenson, one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in her hometown of Logan, Utah.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2016

About the author

Patricia Colleen Murphy is Professor Emerita at Arizona State University, where she taught creative writing and magazine production for 31 years. She won the 2019 Press 53 Poetry Award with her collection Bully Love. She won the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award judged by Stephen Dunn, and her poetry collection Hemming Flames was published by University Press of Colorado in summer 2016. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, and American Poetry Review, and most recently in Black Warrior Review, North American Review, Smartish Pace, Burnside Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, Hobart, decomP, Midway Journal, Armchair/Shotgun, and Natural Bridge. Her work has received awards from the Associated Writing Programs and the Academy of American Poets, Gulf Coast, Bellevue Literary Review, The Madison Review, Glimmer Train Press, and The Southern California Review. A chapter of her memoir-in-progress was published as a chapbook by New Orleans Review

Reviews

[silas denver melvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

deserves five times the reads it has!

[Marylee MacDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems don't take long to read. They take time to absorb. The poems' narrator pulls back the curtain on a family bludgeoned by a mother's addiction and mental illness. Self-pity doesn't come into it--just excruciatingly precise observation. In "Cutlass Ciera" Mom has pulled to the side of the road to immolate herself. Like hammer blows, these lines bring the suicide vividly into focus: "Where you watered/yourself like a little/daffodil--splash, splash, splash/across your roots."

[Matthew Gavin Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murphy's poems blew my doors off. This is heartbreaking, strange, beautiful, essential work. Finally, the nightmarish is allowed to waltz with the incantatory, and it's all I could do to bask in their whirling, my mouth agape, filled with the roar of their footlights.

[Patty Paine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is actually a re-read. So good I had to read it twice!

[Ting Gou · Rating 5 out of 5]

With this collection of poems, Patricia Murphy follows the effects of mental illness on a family over the course of decades. Often with short and biting declarations, the narrator skillfully walks the line between commentary and introspection, as seen in “Cutlass Ciera.” Confronting the memory of her mother’s suicide-attempt-by-burning with a series of swift statements, including the lines “I bet that day started with / a gas can,” the narrator transitions seamlessly into the revelation, “I’ve never known such certainty as you, / when you pulled into the spot where you meant / to die.” These are poems that draw you in with sharp wit and then refuse to let you go until you’ve had a chance to also consider the gravity and loss etched into each acerbic line.

When read sequentially, the poems help each other construct a larger narrative about the family. Facts revealed in one poem will add depth to relationships and situations described in earlier poems. While the poems build off each other, the collection doesn’t limit itself by pursuing one trajectory for its characters or for their relationships. There is no redemptive arc here or journey into madness. Instead, the narrator in these poems constantly questions her own characterization of her family members, especially her mother. At its core, the collection explores the ways in which one talks about trauma. Murphy ends the collection with the lines, “Yesterday I invented fire. / Today I’m hemming flames.” How much of the pain, the fire, is invented or rekindled simply in the retelling, and how much of writing is an attempt to control, or hem, the flames? Isn’t the act of hemming itself also an act of invention?

As a medical student going into psychiatry, I appreciate this collection’s nuanced depiction of mental illness and its effects. As a poet, I admire how Murphy delicately explores the role of writing in understanding traumatic memories. Hemming Flames is a dazzling and haunting collection.

[Jen Knox · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in Patricia Colleen Murphy's Hemming Flames shook me. One by one, they informed and entertained. More, they reminded me of my own confusions, insecurities, regrets, and growth. They examined the complexities of family dynamics that can never be fully understood, only felt across time and experience.

These poems go deep, they re-angle light. The narrative styles vary, but these poems share one thing: precision. It is Murphy's ability to see my rapid-paced, over-worked, easily distracted mind and raise me one. Thank you to the author for slowing me down with passages, such as:

"But I do know how it felt when the cat
kept slinking closer to the room

full of coyotes in costume. And even
though I let things nearly happen,

no one can say I did not live a long time
in the danger theater, where the play begins
with all the dolls behaving perfectly."

I will return to this collection. I will show it off. This is a book full of heart and grit and love. Read it.

[Claire Polders · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Hemming Flames" is more than an impressive collection of poems; it’s a lyrical narrative, a devastating family portrait in which no one is innocent yet some are more to blame than others. Patricia Colleen Murphy doesn’t shy away from any subject, making this collection raw and truthful. The narrator, if you can call it such in poetry, talks to us from inside the most terrible moments yet also from outside, reflectively, looking back. And she responds to these moments both physically and emotionally, due to a continuing family symbiosis. In Murphy’s words: “Now sadness is a sneeze. / It arrives during the punch line, / or when my mouth is full / of wishes. I’m wearing the joyful / face you’ve been wanting to see. / But then that tickle.”

[Faye · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am writing this review while the images from this beautifully written book are still swimming in my mind. Patricia Colleen Murphy is an extraordinary poet. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading a memoir, because I found myself getting lost in the painful images of a tortured childhood in a troubled suburban family and wanting to pull the author out. I will have to read the poems again numerous times to feel that I more deeply understand them, because they are so layered and imaginative. But what bursts through it all is a true talent and the heart of a courageous writer and survivor. There is so much here to dig into; I look forward to reading these poems again.

[Jeredith Merrin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hemming Flames is hard to talk about, harrowing. It aims at truth-telling: on all that familial darkness, let there be light. There's a voice here that is strenuously direct, arresting. And in this book about biological family, poetic family also makes its appearance. Anne Sexton shows up, who would, I think, “get” this project; Elizabeth Bishop shows up, who would not. And even T.S. Eliot: “What a prig.”
There are many, many lines in this collection that hit hard, and stick: "I'm not afraid to hit someone if they need it." Hemming Flames reminds us of one powerful reason for writing: "I am landing the axe/to save myself."

[Jade Lougee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patricia Murphy bares her soul with poetry that can only be described as splinter-pulling memoir. Without inciting pity or seeming to pander to conjure false emotion from her audience, Murphy speaks plainly about a childhood that shouldn’t have happened to anyone. She offers herself up as a sacrifice to the reader, and she does so with no apologies. Her words are succinct and far from artifice – layman’s words spun into a fantastically complex form. She is mesmerizing in her seeming simplicity – even someone who “hates” poetry would readily become "cultured" just to hear more of her work.

[Aimee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hemming Flames is a look into a life growing up with a family member with mental illness, depression, addiction. These poems are not at all easy to read, witnessing the pain and anger emanating through each word, but with each poem brings a new way of thinking about mental illness and the lives affected by it. This is a must read for anyone looking for a genuine, and honest look into a dark and complex world of survival.

[H. Rae Monk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of raw emotion, morbid humor, the flaws we find in ourselves and our families and learning to deal with the death of parents as an adult. I laughed, I cried, I gasped at the horrible familiarity. Full of the relatable details of dealing with grief and families with dark sides. I couldn't put it down!

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a intense collection: family mental illness, travel, self-conception break down, and grief abandon it. Yet, this little dark gem of a book is more about survival and anger than victimhood. It's often strange and arresting, unflinching, and yet there is a core of relatable humanity in Murphy's poems. Highly recommended.

[Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many poems (and individual lines) in this collection that knock you back with their craft and clarity and wrenching honesty. Among my favorites: "My Brother, Hoarding"; "My Armamentarium"; "Scrotum and Bone"; "Memory as Diary"; "On Being Born."

[Jason Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Hemming Flames” is a ballet through the flames of angst and disgust. It reaches out to those who have dealt with mental illness in an animalistic family, and offers no gentle hand, but an inspiringly raw fist. I plan on reading it many more times over!

[Izzy Montoya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murphy explores familial relationships with unrelenting honesty. These poems open up a dialogue which many prefer to sweep under the rug, yet they are also beautifully crafted. The notion that one can create something out of fire comes to life in these poems. A great read.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful melding of tragic brutality and abrupt humor in this collection of poems, focusing on the ways that mental illnesses can completely dismantle a family. Raw, but not in a way that denies each poem an interesting formal structure.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are lines in this book which make you want to rip your heart out. This book is about anger and vulnerability and family and survival. The poems stay with you - I keep changing my mind about which one I love most, giving me the pleasure of reading them all again and again.

[Adrianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing collection, which I reviewed for the Quarterly Conversation http://quarterlyconversation.com/hemm...
I highly recommend it for its visceral, always crafted, taut handling of the highly flammable material it shapes so brilliantly.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

took me forever to read bc the contents disturbed me and i couldn’t keep going. i feel bad giving this book a low rating because it wasn’t bad, just not for me.

[Darrin Doyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Hemming Flames is unflinching, bold, grim, and beautiful. Poems that vibrate with a kind of electrical charge, language and subject fusing in ways that deeply unsettle and mystify. There is anger, aggression, and an emotion that would be called sadness if it were not so complex and un-self-pitying. A mother with severe mental illness, in and out of institutions, negligent, destructive, chronically suicidal. A sexually abusive brother grown morbidly obese and agoraphobic. A father who is absent even as he sits nightly in his recliner. The speaker, a voice, the woman behind the curtain, stands torn between horror and healing, tipping at times in each direction simultaneously. Murphy’s language ranges wonderfully between lyricism and bluntness:

From “Murmur”
All the dog wants is to catch a baby bird
and then break her tiny neck and then
poke her pink brain with his pink tongue
and then spit out the feathers all over
the green ocean of the back lawn.

From “On Being Orphaned”
I find a shirt in my hand but can’t remember
the word for shirt or hand. Or how to put it on?

These brave, heartbreaking, unsentimental poems are a wrecking ball for memory, trauma, and pain. Highly recommended.

[Jacob Appel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patricia Colleen Murphy's "Hemming Flames" is an insightful and unsettling debut collection, intensely personal, yet touched with underlying truths that transcend its particular sufferings. Stephen Dunn rightly hails the work, but his mention in the introduction of the volume's "Plathian relentlessness," might lead one to expect some of Plath's opacity, while what I love about this collection is its cogent lyricism -- a lucidity and universality that seems more Philip Larkin than confessional, apparent in such sharp-eyed lines as, "Today the rain is in between falling hard / and falling soft. Either way, it extinguishes / all the small desires of life." At times, there is mordant social commentary at work: "The neighbors tsk when I drive / my riding mower to the liquor store." Yet the wisdom rings beyond the moments captured: "I have spent so long apprenticed / to the drunk and insane / that I know terror dressing / up in anger's hat and coat." "Hemming Flames" is a veritable tour de force, a tale of mental illness and family struggle told with abiding authenticity. It announces the debut of a major American poet.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

A devastating collection of poems dealing with tough topics in a way that leaves a memorable impression, written by a contemporary poet unafraid to openly discuss humanity's deepest fears.

You would be hard-pressed to find a better debut collection published in recent years. The last lines of the book deliver on what the rest of the collection promises - that there is symbolic relationship between the images and interconnected stories - beyond lyrical intensity - clasped within the slim volume's covers. As re-readable as her second production: Bully Love. Tame is not a word to describe her work, but even the faint of heart will be able to perceive the deep thought and care that went into these poems.

[Maureen Alsop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Threaded in ash and spun aware. Hemming Flames’ poems are a series of needles stitching the reader, without pity, into childhood’s singed edges. An embroidery of addiction, violence, neglect. As if memory can scald the body’s interior, these poems are written not from urgency but acute clarity, fierce in their pressure, tightly binding past injuries without sedation. Read full review here:

https://medium.com/anomalyblog/becaus...

[Nicole Lemme · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Hemming Flames" was a difficult read because of the subject matter, but excellently written. It manages to be simultaneously strong and delicate, conveying an immense variety of emotions and the poet's personal experiences. I admittedly had to take breaks throughout the book due to its weightiness but all in all a terrific work. Highly recommend!!

[Mai-Quyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although the subject matter was heavy, this was the perfect book to read when I couldn't sleep one night; I couldn't put it down! The poems were raw, unique, and diverse, offering a variety of tones and styles. I highly recommend it.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am really far behind on putting up reviews for the books that I have read this year, so I am leaving only the star ratings for a few. Strangely, I feel quite guilty about that... But the longer I leave it, the less the possibility that I will actually update with what I have read. So here we are.

"The Birth of No" is such a delicious poem.

[Tim Tufford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two reasons why you need to read this book:
1. Patricia Colleen Murphy knows how to set the mood. The poems in this collection are dark, funny, hopeful, self-deprecating and uplifting – sometimes all at once. Not only does this give Hemming Flames tonal variety, it gives us, as readers, a greater insight into the author's psyche. By the time you finish reading this book, you'll feel like you know her. It's extremely difficult to write figuratively while also managing to be unguarded and frank, but she's able to pull it off in each poem.
2. The characters (or the members of her immediate family) are immaculately characterized; in fact, I don't think I've ever read a poem (or collection of poems) that contained characters who were as compelling and multi-faceted as these were. She does this, again, by approaching her subjects with an unprecedented amount of honesty, and a warranted appreciation for their complexities.

Stand-out poems: Losing Our Milk Teeth, Turkish Get-Ups, The Year of Our Comorbity, From the Book of Attacks, Liminal