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)