Disheveled Histories

Michelle Murphy

Wet Cement Press

 

I’ve kept Michelle Murphy’s book Disheveled Histories near me for a while. As with most poetry books that work outside the bounds of conventional lyric or narrative styles, reading it can feel at times like entering someone else’s backyard after dark and trying to find your way toward the dimly lit house. I’m all-in for this mix of darkness and light, because Murphy’s enigmatic poems spill over with beauty, even with when they are addressing the unanswerable: why does someone you love choose to take their own life, and how do you live with the sadness of the past when even the present (let alone the future) is so uncertain?

 

Yes, uncertainty: from the very first poem, “How to Fold a Paper Frog,” Murphy invites us to face “[n]ervous/detonations across the globe” while “[w]ildfire dust blankets/ floors, seethesacross avenues” and “soothsayers read into various faults.” She bluntly asks: “You mean to go/into this world by yourself?” (both 11).

 

As we travel through the book, Murphy issues would-be instructions for making this journey (e.g., “How to Flower,” “How to Crow” and more) and descriptions of “Byways and One Way Streets” that advise, for example: “Avoid corridors of those/ who pace their voice” (49); "Done with guns/ plants seeds inside pockets” (50). Throughout, the “you” that is addressed often feels like the poet herself, whom we are overhearing. And it is Murphy’s beloved dead who beckon her forward. The poem “Tremolo” comes early in the book, with the epigraph “For my brother, Brett, who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge one beautiful March morning.” In this eight-part prose poem—each paragraph dangling from the top of a page, over a blank expanse beneath—five of the paragraphs end in impossible questions, such as “Where are you, my love?/ Your wheels off, hands no longer shaking at the sight of/another sunrise”? (22)Yet it is also in this poem that Murphy begins to explore the state of being suspended as a strategy of living with loss. “A swift, you say, never settles on the ground. Is/ a life spent airborne a denial of gravity even if there is no/ intention of finding home?” (23) The sense of being bird-like, winged, at odds with gravity, often emerges in the book.

 

And at the end of “The Moon Sounds Like Exploded Firecrackers” (57), this possibility is offered:…drifting yet persistent noises herd[ ] us forward, moving us in choreographed frequencies, where levitations of sound suspend us in mid-air, our feet barely touching ground. Forgiven.

 

Murphy’s poems move gradually from shock and sorrow to healing. In them, history (as intimate as memory), also moves and changes, from being “disheveled” (28) to something that “weighs/loss according to its pedigree/ but also dances on furniture” (“How to Crow,” 72). So moving, thoughtful, beautiful in sound and shape—these are poems that you will want to keep near you, too.

 

Merle Bachman

The Louisville Review 97

Fall 2025