Description
Poetry. Women's Studies. Winner of the 2016 California Book Award for Poetry. "Beth Murray asks, 'Who are you without breathing in the habitual direction?' And her fierce and forthright inquiry proceeds to create a new current, a new kind of lyric understanding that disrupts the stasis of received language—and of life itself. Moving through the most difficult experiences, Murray evolves a fluidity of trust and curiosity while ever true to her adopted imperative to "make trouble." The loss of this poet to our community would seem a site without consolation, but for this: Murray's troubling of assumption, the risks she takes, are a mode of faith and healing. Here, she sings the 'songs to which I do not yet know the words.'"—Elizabeth Robinson
Author Bio
Beth Murray was born in Chicago on September 22, 1967. She is the author of several chapbooks, including 12 Horrors (Belladonna*), HOPE ETERNITY SEEN ON THE HIP OF A RABBIT (A+ bend) and The Night's Night (Noemi Press), and the book-length poem The Island (Second Story Books). She began writing CANCER ANGEL shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in June of 2011. In 2013 Beth participated in the Poetics of Healing conference in Berkeley, California, "Vital Forms: Healing and the Arts of Crisis," where she performed an excerpt from CANCER ANGEL. Her experience with illness is also chronicled in her blog Healing My Cancer. In her writing, as in her life, Beth practiced spiritual inquiry grounded in deep awareness of the body. In CANCER ANGEL she found healing and epiphany even in the trauma of illness. She died on Wednesday, October 8, 2014 from metastatic breast cancer in her home in Midpines, California, under a full moon.
Author City: MIDPINES, CA USA