Erin Murphy's latest poetry collection is Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, 2024). Her recent work has appeared in Ecotone, Diode, North American Review, SWWIM, Women's Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfiction 2024, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, two Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, and a Best of the Net award. Murphy serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Blair County, Pa., and Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and a Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow for the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

Other poems by Erin Murphy in Verse Daily:
January 26, 2019:   "Generation Stuck" "Cut yourself and you'll get lockjaw..."
April 8, 2014:   "Dear Winged" "The opposite of water..."
March 30, 2011:   "Dear Fringe" "Jangle on a flapper..."
July 24, 2004:  "Descartes's Lover" "What of a father for his daughter..."

Other poems on the web by Erin Murphy:
Three poems
Two poems
"I Feel So Damned Intransitive"
"I-95 Corridor"
Two poems
Four poems
"“Man with Birds and Bread"
"Insomnia Chronicles II"
Five poems
"A Trio of Erasures"
"After 'The Boating Party'"
"After/Before"
"Iambic Pentameter"
Two poems

Erin Murphy's Website.

About Fluent in Blue:

"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

"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