Jessica Purdy : part one

Jessica Purdy is the author of STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House, both released by Nixes Mate in 2017 and 2018. Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry. She is the author of the chapbook Learning the Names (Finishing Line Press 2015). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals including The Night Heron Barks, Radar, Menacing Hedge, SoFloPoJo, Harpy Hybrid, Lily Poetry Review, One Art, Poemeleon, and Museum of Americana. She is poetry editor for the anthology, Ten Piscataqua Writers: https://www.tenpiscataqua.com/writers/. Follow her on Twitter @JessicaPurdy123 and her website: jessicapurdy.com

What are you working on?

I have multiple manuscripts looking for homes. One I’m particularly excited about is a chapbook entitled “The Adorable Knife: Poems on Frances Glessner Lee’s The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.” I am obsessed with the Nutshells enough to have seen them when they were exhibited at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC.

The poems are named after each “Nutshell,” which are meticulously crafted miniature crime scene dioramas meant to help police officers hone their observation skills. It is my intention to honor Frances Glessner Lee’s own attention to detail in crafting these, as well as to imagine possible “solutions” by giving voice to the stories told in the crime scenes. In some of the poems, the speaker is the victim, and in some, the speaker could be the perpetrator. In still others, it is the poet’s voice speaking.

Another manuscript entitled “What’s the Worst that Could Happen?” explores the anxiety of motherhood.

“Annual” is a chapbook of poems written in response to Sylvia Plath’s poems.

“You’re Never the Same” is my ekphrastic manuscript. 

I am generating more poems than I know what to do with these days!