Estate Sale [Paperback]

Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

In a house full of stanzas found inEstate Sale, Dan Murphy opens the door on the objects of his life: accumulated experience and imagination, trauma, personal and political history, inheritances that subtly unearth the forces of the world. Loss becomes a possession, language an act of reclamation, and form appears as the wearing of a dead man’s clothes. One poem reminds us “that things exist, even when out of sight.” In these poems, meaning is found, then, in the search for meaning, refuge in the search for refuge.
 

"Early in Dan Murphy’s elegiac debut, Estate Sale, the poet writes: 'There is only so much sweetness/in this world. I kiss and kiss and it’s gone.' Haunted by the inevitable grief we all must bear, these poems chart the relationship between what we’ve lost and our attempts to hold on. Here, the names of the dead become a talisman for the living, reminding us that what can be recollected can be savored, a moment of sweetness on the tongue. A cosmology of loss, container for the ineffable, Estate Sale is a lovely trove of 'all the words we’ve never spoken.'”—Natasha Trethewey, author of Monument

"These poems are characterized by a dignified formal audacity which answers unerringly to the pressure of felt experience. The artist displays a sensitivity to the local intensities of language, reminding us that every word was once a poem.”—Declan Kiberd, University of Notre Dame

”In Estate Sale Dan Murphy combines the gifts of the storyteller, the singer, and the painter. Listen to these three lines, look at the details, and realize how much is happening: ‘A man standing alone at the lake’s edge/ sees himself shuddering in water/ when wind blows through the trees.’ This heartfelt bolã1