Erin Murphy's beautiful new collection Fluent in Blue asks what it means to be fluent-in a language, in a place and time, and in a body. These poems chart girlhood, motherhood, and citizenship in rural America and offer an unflinching look at the violence and grief of these past difficult years in our country. I love Murphy's elegiac gaze and the fierce way she demands our attention: "I want to person/place/thing you/ from the cold, the blue, the gone."

-Nicole Cooley, author of Mother Water Ash

Fluent in Blue is an homage to small-town lives rendered powerless by bad luck and injustice, and a reflection on how "most of us /ruin ourselves in small increments." It is also a collection fluent in the difficult language of joy. When given the spotlight, small kindnesses remind of their immensurate power to shape life. Erin Murphy is a poet of consummate attentiveness, a storyteller assured in her craft even as she grows "uncertain/with certainty." Fluent in Blue is a rhapsody of uncompromising frankness and tenderness.

-Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Cemetery Ink

in Fluent in Blue, Erin Murphy once again profiles and defines what is or should be urgent and unforgettable, with language and forms that are direct and conversational.

-Gary Ciocco, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette