I Want to Be Your Radio

“I am the mother of the poem. . . . I learn how young I am beside her,” Sheila E. Murphy tells us in this stunning new book. Reading Murphy’s poems is like stepping into a wind tunnel inside a hurricane, yet finding a stillness that allows all the swirls of the world to wrap around her and us. In this latest collection, she brings all her powers to bear upon a fiercely tender interrogation of grief and the languages gained and lost in trying to approach it. But Murphy—as she has so often done throughout her celebrated career—finds a way to explore the tender places without getting lost in them, with language always as a redemptive agent. I have been reading Sheila Murphy’s remarkable poetry for years, and I always find in it a healing salve that tears language apart while simultaneously piecing it back together, presenting it as the healing power it is.

—George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014–2016)

Using multiple forms and a deft mastery of the language, Sheila Murphy continues to astonish with her verbal virtuosity. All our senses are engaged by these deeply inflected poems. I Want to Be Your Radio is a symphonic tone poem in words, an elegy, a love story and so much more. Walking with Murphy through her poetic world, is to be continually amazed by the acuity of her vision, a vision unlike any one else’s. Walk with her, share the insights, be amazed, read her books.

—Alan Catlin, poet, editor of Misfitmagazine.net

Strike up the band! And while you’re at it, strike up the glossary too! There is no radio silence in prolific poet Sheila E. Murphy’s stunning new collection I Want to Be Your Radio, and batteries are most certainly included. These poems are set amid a leitmotif in which our ennobled lexicon dovetails with musical cadence right at a moment when this world is in dire need of an uplifting soundtrack, and which, thank heaven, this poet gleefully and masterfully provides. Drawing on the most salient nuances of Language poetry’s essence, complemented by Murphy’s keen mind for not only observation but for listening, each line offers the reader carte blanche to interpretation in a host of adventurous ways. Brilliant turns of phrase and syntactical sleight of hand create descriptive and picturesque etchings on the psyche that echo through the senses. Murphy’s craftwork is measured and precise, and yet bursting with wild abandon. And, as is her trademark, she demonstrates a heroic range of styles, from prose to pantoums to abecedarians to buck-the rules ghazals, and good old linear poems, made new by the poet’s vast virtuosity, a testament to her passion for words in all their meaningful glory. Yes, this exciting palette of poems reflects Sheila Murphy’s breathtaking intellect, knowledge, talent, and creativity, but perhaps more importantly, they are endowed with, and enhanced by, the poet’s genuine generosity of heart.

—Cindy Hochman, editor-in-chief of First Literary Review-East and author of Telling You Everything

Sheila E. Murphy is a poet who captures the melody in light. Her work, where nouns swell into gestures, acts, and states of being, sings through forms both inherited and invented, throwing wide doors and windows to let in wind and light. A Sheila E. Murphy poem is a distilled celebration of pleasure in the form of a sonata, with Shakespeare on flute and the dramatis personae in counterpoint. What comes through is as close to pure grace as anything you’ll find in American poetry today.

—Lewis LaCook, author of My Friendship with the Lotus-Eaters