Estate Sale
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€18.50
Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
In a house full of stanzas found in Estate Sale, Dan Murphy opens the door on the objects of his life: accumulated experience and imagination, trauma, personal and political history, inheritances that subtly unearth the forces of the world. Loss becomes a possession, language an act of reclamation, and form appears as the wearing of a dead man’s clothes. One poem reminds us “that things exist, even when out of sight.” In these poems, meaning is found, then, in the search for meaning, refuge in the search for refuge.
In a house full of stanzas found in Estate Sale, Dan Murphy opens the door on the objects of his life: accumulated experience and imagination, trauma, personal and political history, inheritances that subtly unearth the forces of the world. Loss becomes a possession, language an act of reclamation, and form appears as the wearing of a dead man’s clothes. One poem reminds us “that things exist, even when out of sight.” In these poems, meaning is found, then, in the search for meaning, refuge in the search for refuge.
A former tradesman, Dan Murphy teaches creative writing and literature in Greater Boston. His individual poems have appeared in national and international literary journals. He lives with his wife, their two daughters, and a dog on a modest “estate.”