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Thu, 10 Jan 2008
Book of the Day: Dislocation and Other Theories by Erin Murphy
Erin Murphy is a poet who writes with great flair and panache. This is not light or faint praise: Murphy's poems have an energy, an inventiveness, that is invigorating. Whether writing in free verse, form or prose poetry, her work examines the details of daily experience with humor and curiosity. Her latest book, Dislocation and Other Theories, bears out this observation.
Consider "Hula Dancer":
Hula Dancer
She will dislocate her hips. Or maybe they're already dislocated, a kind of double-jointedness, like the suburban girls back East who wrap their heels behind heads in slumber party stunts. There is fury in her rhythm, her belly a dark blur beneath coconut c-cups. More than once a drunk man in an airport aloha shirt has slipped a hotel key in the cinched waist of her grass skirt, slurring a room number in her ear. She drops the keys in the trash with the paper plates from this nightly luau staged by a fair-skinned businessman from Chicago. After the show, she'll change into a tank top and low-rise jeans with a red thong peeking up in back. She'll board the number 8 bus--named, after a decade of island time planning, simply The Bus--and listen to Ludacris on her iPod as she makes her way inland to neighborhoods where laundry stretches across apartment balconies. On Monday, her night off, she'll sit with a bottle of Sunny Delight under a line of dishtowels and her father's boxers as the wind picks up, lifting the clothes, bending the palms. And in between the buildings, pulsing low and steady, she'll see the real sun, Victoria's Secret red, right where it belongs.
While this poem is unusual among Murphy's work in being prose poetry, its fast-paced energy is not. Dislocation and Other Theories never lets you settle into a comfortable reptition.