Reviewed by Emily Banks

Patricia Colleen Murphy's second collection, Bully Love, takes readers on her journey from Ohio to Arizona, a change of location that comes to represent a seismic shift in perspective. Murphy's poems are unflinchingly personal and full of minute details that stick with you long after reading, but the story of change, loss, and growth she develops speaks broadly to the human condition.

Most immediately striking in this collection are the stunning physical descriptions of the two landscapes Murphy moves between. The poem that opens Bully Love, "Monsoon Season, Tempe Arizona," introduces the vague feeling of displacement that pervades her experience and clashes, constantly, with the dangerous immediacy of her new setting. The unique images she crafts, like the "wind's dark tiara" and the "dry skin of desert," belie an outsider's perspective, the innovative vision that comes with fresh eyes, and wonder combined with slight terror. In the middle of the poem, Murphy interrupts her descriptive language with the line, "My father called from Ohio," and this shift conveys the distance the speaker feels from her previous home which goes, of course, beyond the physical. While her father watches the "brown / shadow on TV—/ forty stories tall," an image that is still remote for him, the speaker's visceral experience of the desert's extreme weather underscores her separation from the phone call. She thinks, "So this is what it means / to be close to the sky," an exhilarating, yet anxiety-inducing, thought that hints at the tension between beauty and danger Murphy weaves through these poems. 

"The weather" is often used to exemplify a boring conversation topic, but Bully Love makes it fascinating and urgent, more central than the usual scene-setting imagery. The contrast between Arizona heat and Ohio chill that runs through the book curates a sensory experience that brings readers closer to the duality between the speaker's past and present. Her displacement gains further context in "No Coats in October," a phrase which, in-and-of-itself, signals the perspective of someone new to a place, the way relocation makes seemingly small, mundane elements of life surprising. In sparse syntax that is at once jarring and matter-of-fact, Murphy writes, "From here I claim / Ohio is East Coast," illustrating how her move has made her see her old home differently, rendering it, in a sense, as strange to her as her new home is. The poem continues: 

When my father asks,

do I remember that dry
cleaners off Cheviot Road,

family place. I answer yes. 
But it is the same way

I remember him kissing my mother
before her fourth asylum

This turn from observation to memory adds weight to our understanding of the speaker's past. The mother's "fourth asylum" introduces more layers of disconnection, the displacement of the mother from her own home and of the speaker from her mother, giving us a stronger understanding of how this theme operates figuratively as well as literally in the speaker's life. By connecting the physical shift in space to the shifts of time that have distanced her from her family's story, Murphy portrays displacement as inevitable. The remoteness of these memories, which she presents without sentimentality, makes the Arizona landscape feel that much more tangible. Its intensity overshadows the past recollections that nonetheless haunt the speaker in her new space. 

In "The Implications of Ice," a temperature change again signals a return to displaced memory. Murphy writes, "The buckeyes began leaning over the house long before my mother's madness. From my corner room / I watch their branches in a cold hug," then opens into a depiction of a typical childhood snow day, with school cancellations on the radio and her father working the plow. Her association of family with coldness, especially with the phrase "cold hug," further accentuates the firm divide between past and present. The cold is not depicted as numb or emotionless, but rather suggests a scene frozen in time, inaccessible yet perfectly preserved. In present tense, but situated firmly in the past by the "before" in its second line, this poem marks the speaker's mother's madness as a turning point, a line against which previous memories become indelibly fixed in the past. As the poem continues, a lighthearted memory of the speaker's crush, whom she is unable to meet after school because of the snow, circles back to the subject of her mother as she writes:

the windows offer a clear view of this powder
that has stopped time. I'm sure that my mother
felt this—in a bedroom in her hometown, in a climate
much colder and more prone to complications,
about a man less handsome, more timid than my father.

And now she is nowhere. When the phone rings
just imagine all of life's small disasters. 

Again jumping backwards in time, Murphy considers the inconsequential, yet distinctly memorable, moments that create a past. While her mother's colder climate is surely literal, its figurative implications further cast the cold as that which is frozen in time, her mother's memories even less accessible than her own. The specificity of memory in this poem—the speaker's crush calling her nose "Scandinavian" is a wonderful addition—grounds it in a tangible past. But, as she considers how her mother certainly had a similar experience as a child but is now "nowhere," we see the inadequacy of memory to tie us down, to make us solid and whole. This realization further illuminates the speaker's personal displacement; it is not a lack of memory, but an understanding that those memories cannot constitute a solid sense of belonging, that one's past can be palpably memorable yet entirely disconnected from the present as if frozen in ice.

Throughout the collection, maternal madness reappears, a persistent thread readers can momentarily forget but are constantly reminded of. Close to the end, the more confessional "Tell Your Story Walking" gives us a clearer picture of the speaker's relationship with her mother and the fear of madness underlying her feelings of displacement. The poem opens with a morning scene in which the speaker reflects, "Getting up makes me feel like a good girl." After completing her breakfast ritual, Murphy writes, "I spend the morning terrified about what I am going to do next. / I was fifteen when you went mad." This turn indicates the fear of self familiar for anyone who has had a close family member with a mental illness. The poem ends with the hard-hitting lines, "There are two ways to tell a story. / When I was fifteen you went mad and I saved you. / When I was fifteen you went mad and I never forgave you." The decisive rhyme in this final couplet offers finality to this thread in the collection, at once a confession and an act of self-acceptance. This, I feel, is what Murphy has been working towards all along, and the quiet tension in the other poems that reference her mother's illness work beautifully to build towards this breakthrough moment. 

The thread of a ruptured maternal relationship connects to the inhospitable landscape Murphy's speaker finds herself in, her attempts to grow new roots in a difficult climate. In "Dying, Four Ways: Maryland," "Dying, Four Ways: Arizona," "Dying, Four Ways: Nevada" and "Dying, Four Ways: Ohio," which are spaced throughout the collection, Murphy further emphasizes the theme of rootlessness. These spare yet tragic poems punctuate the narrative with inescapable loss. By describing the deaths of her parents and in-laws without naming them, she portrays mortality as inevitable and mundane, yet uniquely mundane for each person. The small details she includes in these poems, like "Let the Cocker Spaniel pee / on the carpet" or "Complain about Bush/Cheney and eat / sandwiches while watching CNN," are brutal in their everyday nature, recalling for readers the deaths we've known. Avoiding the romantic or sentimental, these elegies are all the more jarring for their refusal to glamorize death, bringing us into the real, unglamorous experience of watching a relative die from afar. Similarly, "Golden Dragon, Takeout" emphasizes the mundane elements of tragedy as she writes, "Here's the Kung Pao. / Your father is dying." Juxtaposing the familiar, and even comical, with the unfamiliar terrain of death illustrates the need to find grounding in a new, untethered space. "Between our four parents," she writes, "there isn't one good lung." 

Woven alongside the losses that structure Bully Love is the speaker's own aging and her decision not to have children. It is refreshing to see this choice discussed in a contemplative, but not regretful or apologetic, manner. Childlessness operates here as a means of breaking the cycle of loss and creation aligned with the midwestern landscape in favor of the dazzling and dangerous constant sensuality of Arizona. In "Eschew," Murphy writes, "I've realized too late it's not children / I dislike, it's parents," but she nonetheless rejoices in her ability to "tell what / day of the week it is by / counting the bananas," conveying a sensual luxuriousness to her life without children. In "Forty," the collection's penultimate poem, she writes, "I am a tall / canyon from which / water has dried," and concludes:

Under the weight
of these stars a 
new type of tea 
steeps in my bones. 

While the image of a dry canyon plays with the familiar trope of barren womanhood, Murphy subverts expectations by locating beauty and magic in the canyon's vast emptiness. Drawing strength from the desert landscape, she finds within herself a power that, like the desert, defies the climatic and familial cycles of her childhood, offering a new way to live.  

By the end of Bully Love, we feel an intimacy with the poet, as if we've had a long conversation with a close friend. The enjoyable sonic qualities of these poems, Murphy's ability to craft unique metaphors, and her surprising bursts of humor give the collection a recognizable and cohesive voice. Its composition is admirable as well, as Murphy weaves together several themes that coalesce increasingly as we read, shifting frequently between temporal and physical settings so we become a part of her displacement and, eventually, belonging. Murphy treats her subject matter with irony, anger, and sadness, but her poems are driven by an underlying, unrelenting love for the landscape she struggles to comprehend. It is ultimately a story of discovering the self anew, and, as a reader, I felt privileged to peer through the window of consciousness Murphy so generously opens for us.