Description: Swoon: New and Selected Poems by Erin Murphy spans more than two decades and ten collections, from her debut, Science of Desire, to her latest work. Prize-winning lyric, narrative, and documentary poems shimmer alongside demi-sonnets, a form of her invention. Marked by tender observation, humor, linguistic play, interrogation of injustice, and masterful craft, Swoon gives us hope that "the planet has only/ one conjunction: and and and and and."
Brief description: Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen previous books of poetry and prose, most recently Mother as Conjunction: Lyric Essays, Human Resources, and Fluent in Blue, winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry. Her edited anthologies of poetry, creative nonfiction, medical humanities, and docupoetics are published by Wesleyan University Press, the University of Nebraska Press, and SUNY Press. She received her M.F.A. in Poetry from UMass Amherst where she wrote her thesis under the direction of James Tate. Her awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, two Foreword INDIES Book of the Year awards, the National Writers Union Poetry Prize judged by Donald Hall, the Foley Poetry Award, and the Patterson Prize for Literary Excellence. She serves as poetry editor of The Summerset Review. Murphy is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and the 2026-27 Penn State Laureate.
Review Quotes:
Throughout her long and distinguished career, Erin Murphy continues to surprise and delight across an impressive range of forms and subjects. It is wonderful for us to have this book bringing together all these fine poems full of humor and heart. Reading this collection will make you feel like you just had a long conversation with one of your best friends, and one of our finest poets. -Jim Daniels, author of Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems
The superb new and selected poems in Swoon by Erin Murphy showcase her alchemical skills. She is a wizard of the poetic form (abecedarian, cento, ekphrasis, erasure, and villanelle, to name a few), along with the demi-sonnet, her own gorgeous and important form. Is there anything this poet cannot do? What I adore most is Murphy's kaleidoscopic view of the world matched equally by her depth of feeling-the curiosity, and then connection, she offers to all of us, her fellow humans, in our complex imperfections and joys. Swoon is a book you need to hold close. -Susan Rich, author of Blue Atlas
Erin Murphy's significant tome Swoon is-as expected from a poet of her caliber, range, and experience-simply exceptional. Wise, insightful, and oft-humorous, these poems teach us "...what it is/ to be a poet," whether by embracing lyric, narrative, prose, formal, documentary, or experimental poems-or, as in Murphy's case, all of them, including her self-invented, seven-line demi-sonnet. They also educate us about art, pop culture, current events, and how to be a full and complete human. Swoon is a fitting legacy for Murphy's signature style "to be remembered and known and maybe/ even a little loved."
-Jen Karetnick, author of Inheritance with a High Error Rate
Swoon is a story of a life. It is a story of poetry and its creation. It's the story of a poet who understands that life is poetry, and poetry is life. -Glynn Young, tweeetspeak
"To call Erin Murphy's Swoon: New and Selected Poems a 'tome' is to begin to properly praise it. Its pages contain work from her ten full-length poetry books, and new poems. The books are presented in date order, and comprise, remarkably, a time-span of only twenty-two years whereby she moves with ease and expertise through ideas and sensations, personae and varied poetic use of narrative, lyrical forms and rhyme...Murphy is not just a great writer, but a great thinker, using irony, opposition, [and] social tension... to make her points."
-Gary Ciocco, Pittsburgh Review of Books