PERUGIA PRESS Poetry PRIZE WINNER

Published by Perugia Press

Purchase at Asterism

ISBN 10: 0997807636
Publishing Date: September 15, 2019
Pages: 99

Abby E. Murray’s debut Hail and Farewell is a bold examination of the intimate relationship between a soldier and a pacifist, bound together by choice. The collection reveals a wife’s perspective during her husband’s deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, including the whiplash of infertility experienced between tours. Inseparable by heart, their marriage is also built on disagreement. Military spouses are often expected to express absolute patriotism, and to conform to gender roles shaped by sexist, archaic ideals. But these poems don’t aim to accuse; rather, they call for compassion and community in the face of isolation. Capable of inserting levity into the most dire of circumstances, the poet never lets the reader forget what is at stake. Murray tears the idealized from the real, illuminating the brutality of battle and loss—traumas we tend to avoid in both military and civilian life. Hail and Farewell is an expertly woven treatise on love, war, and politics.

REVIEWS

At a time when lines of ideological division run particularly deep, it gives me hope to see a poet exploring the nuances of patriotism and pacifism through the voice of a speaker who embraces the duality of her identity as both a wife and also a person defined by much more than her gender or marital status. Though full of men, Hail and Farewell is a book made of everything that a woman is expected to be—beautiful, fecund, and endlessly patient—cast against the surreal landscapes of a homecoming ceremony for returning soldiers or the military family housing that turns strangers into reluctant intimates. Most of all, I’m heartened to see that what I’ve always told my students is true: If there is a story that needs to be told, there is someone who can tell it. And damn, but Abby Murray tells this one.

—Keetje Kuipers

Hail and Farewell is a triumph of womanhood and a reminder that we are all touched by war. The small questions the poems ask about what it means to love, to support, and to find strength in the spaces of everyday are magnified against a backdrop of conflict and by the desire to make something from uncertainty. There is a sense that the world could be upended at any moment, and these poems open those moments and ask us to step closer.
—Dorianne Laux