We're thrilled to announce Carrie Murphy, MFA '11, has published her first full-length book, Pretty Tilt, with Keyhole Press. We couldn't be more proud of her. For more information about purchasing the book, go here. Her chapbook, Meet the Lavenders, appeared in 2011 from Birds of Lace. She currently works as a teacher and freelance writer. She will be doing a number of readings in support of Pretty Tilt:
- Fri. April 13 (xtra spooky!), Brooklyn, NY at The Mustard Beak w/Gina Abelkop, Niina Pollari, Rohin Guha and Jason Helm, 7.30pm
- Sun. April 15, Washington, DC- Three Tents Reading Series w/Gina Abelkop, Eugene Cross and Joe Hall
- Mon. April 16, Durham, NC- Finger & Thumb inaugural reading w/Kate Zambreno and Gina Abelkop @ The Pinhook, 6.30pm
Here are the blurbs for the book:
Carrie Murphy writes the ambiguous and ambivalent viscera beneath the surface of the pretty girl in her “tragic dresses,” quoting the canon of girlhood - Clueless and Tori Amos and Dirty Dancing and Disney and My Little Pony. "The tools I used/to write myself a girl." Her girls are gooshy and oozey and bleeding and bothered and wanting and horny as hell, like craven and craving Molly Blooms. Like if the Lisbon sisters grew up in the nineties and were not projections but desirous, desiring of the icky, beautiful boys, writing of crusted panties and the phenomenology of the blow job or wanting to fuck a 15-year-old Prince William at his mother’s funeral. “All we have in common is our colossal boredom.” These poems are hilarious, joyful, dirty, deeply felt, fucked, totally inappropriate, gorgeous. --Kate Zambreno, author of Green Girl and Heroines
In Carrie Murphy’s dazzling poem “Mirrorball,” there is the realized tautology that “To be luminous is to acquiesce, to acquiesce is to be luminous.” It would be tempting to classify the spinning surface delights of this book into the categories of the girlish, the sex kitten, the raunchy, or the princess, but then the rigorous self-awareness of these poems would be ignored. Unappeasable, disastrous carnal appetite loudly proclaims itself from behind a myriad of masks, but when the tender self finally “unbraids,” it blinds everyone who sees it. Pretty Tilt is a radiant debut. --Richard Greenfield, author of A Carnage in the Lovetrees and Tracer
Pretty Tilt is an utterly engaging love letter to the incandescent moments that, when threaded together, represent girlhood--young women on the cusp of something just beyond themselves, reaching, fumbling, falling, in sometimes glorious, sometimes garish, but always beautifully rendered, unflinching ways.--Roxane Gay, author of Ayiti
Carrie Murphy’s Pretty Tilt aches my body like the Sweetarts she invokes in the first devastating poem of the book. Every girl inside its pages is full to bursting like an ulcer waiting to wreak its havoc, your stomach made a tender, loving carapace for them despite their reckless living. Each bong hit, backseat fuck and curious touch splits me open with a desire to reach inside the page and stroke each girl’s dirty, sweaty head. Pretty Tilt is full of a love, ferocity and skill of creation that will stun you like an accidental football to the face in gym class.--Gina Abelkop, author of Darling Beastlettes
