Description
Scheduled for release on April 4, 2026, Lung Hours is a winner of the Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize which honors poets who work (or have worked) in K-12 education.
Jessica Purdy’s award-winning collection, Lung Hours, grows from the space of Sylvia Plath’s “purple wilderness,” where night is a living world. “Things sing in the stubborn trees,” claws of a coyote whip into a sleeping human mouth, rocks have a scent, the woods—inviting, disturbing—are never far. The “attic of the mind” is a place of jumbled objects and intentions, where “Everything is moving except you.” In this Jungian playground, the day’s work follows the dreamer into night. These poems are a doing and an undoing, concluding, finally, “You’re absurd being human.” And yet, Purdy endears us to the human experience with poignant portrayals of parenting, partnering, awaiting diagnoses, and even starting—in mid-life—to run. Reader and speaker alike are reassured, “nothing can harm me”—“the house cannot burn.”
—Mary Buchinger
Author of There is only the sacred and the desecrated
Jessica Purdy’s Lung Hours is a journey through a woman’s landscape of childhood to motherhood to middle age, with its new and full moons, its winter solstices, milkweeds, seeds that she as a non-gardener can still push into dirt. This book is one of children encountering monsters, of dreams and becoming a powerful monster “She-Hulk” herself, of epistolary poems, and in the end a promise of spring and then returning us to the end of October, when we know there will be another cold winter in her northern climate. With her eloquent language and rich sensory details, Purdy captures both the cruelty and beauty of nature and our bodies and how they can still be full of joy, even in and because of their vulnerability.
—Kika Dorsey
Author of Occupied and Good Ash
In Jessica Purdy’s Lung Hours, the dialectic and the lyric are wound around each as if copper wire were laced through the body’s vascular system, where the hard lived wisdom and bodily betrayal of middle age are struck through by the lightning strike of language and image. Here is a study of the fragile skein of family and womanhood as well a deep meditation on the nature of being as Purdy moves through and gets stuck inside of time: “Say you’re skipping now/ the way you used to as a child. /Who are you exactly anymore?” And ever hanging over the poems are the questions of how our selves change over a life and how do we reconcile with the selves we were, and the selves we yet hope to be: “When/ I thought I knew myself I was a period at the end of a/ sentence. I was never a question. Until I was.” Collected here are poems that at once delight us with surprises of language, of line, of sentence, of syntax and then suddenly stop us with the cold breath of haunted spaces and the poltergeist of memory. And yet there is, as the title suggests, ever a space to dream, to breathe, to love, and to repair the reaving of each day. I’ve long been a fan of Purdy’s work and Lung Hours may be my favorite book of hers so far.
—Matt Miller
Author of Tender the River (Texas A&M University Press)
Jessica Purdy’s previous books include The Adorable Knife: Poems based on The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (NH Writers’ Project People’s Choice Award winner), STARLAND, and Sleep in a Strange House (NH Literary Award for Poetry finalist). She teaches Creative Writing at SNHU and at Noble High School in North Berwick, Maine. She lives in coastal New Hampshire with her family.
