A Conversation with Jessica Purdy
Jessica Purdy is a two time DIHP contributor and an exquisite poet. We caught up with her to chat about her latest collection of poetry, Lung Hours. Our conversation ranges from dreams to the body to the ways in which we can best support our fellow writers, plus a sneak peek at her next book’s title! Don’t forget to enjoy three poems from Lung Hours, below the jump. — CMG
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1. Our traditional opening gambit: What is your favorite pocket?
Marsupial
2. What is the strangest place you’ve ever given a reading?
Here on the Seacoast of New Hampshire we have a monthly poetry open mic called “Beat Night” where poets get to read their work with the Beat Night Band. You get to tell the band the feel of the poem, whether it’s rainy or sad, uplifting or flavored with apples, or what-have-you, and how the poem moves. The band then improvises the song as you read. It’s quite amazing!
3. Can you tell us about the title of your new collection? How did you land on that and what is the story underneath?
Lung Hours gets its title from the hours of 3-5 am which corresponds to the lungs on the circadian body clock. Since these poems often use the fodder of my dreams, I like the idea of titling the book after the time of night for deep sleep, dreams, and memory. Sleep is a necessity that often eludes me in those hours, in my anxious, mid-life body. The lungs are a fitting organ for a poet to use in a title, as poetry is all about breathing. The lungs work autonomically, but the brain controls the breath to ease anxiety.
4. What are your thoughts on the role of social media for poets/writers/literature in general? Are these platforms an efficient way to disseminate work or a floodgate of noise or perhaps both?
I like it when journals and presses use it wisely (like Does It Have Pockets!), tagging poets’ names, using cool artwork (not AI!) and making it easy for poets to share their posts. I like to share journal issues I am included in, but the whole screenshotting of poems and writing posts is exhausting. There’s always something I forget to say and have to edit. I don’t want social media to be another job! But I do love to hear about and read other people’s publications, and often I find new journals that way. Honestly, I think social media is great for poets. I have met so many poets all over the world I never would have otherwise.
5. If you were talking with a new writer, what might you tell them about the creation and maintenance of their writing community?
Seek out open mics and local writing groups. Support local poets by attending their readings. Talk to them after they give a reading. Buy their books and read them! Share work you love on social media, not just your own. Join online workshops that lift you up. Reciprocate by supporting their work. Give readings. Attend Literary Festivals. Make friends with indie booksellers.
6. How do literary magazines support your goals as a writer?
Publishing in literary magazines is a great way to get your work seen and builds an audience. It also helps you when you are trying to get a book published. Having a nice acknowledgements page in a manuscript is confidence-building and gives your work credibility.
Journals like DIHP that nominate for awards like the Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Micro-fiction, Best Spiritual Literature, Best New Poets, etc. are wonderful! I am honored to have been nominated by your journal for Best of the Net.
7. What would you do differently when you write your next book?
I already have the next book! Titled “Oneironaut” which means “dream traveller.” It has been accepted by White Stag Press and will come out in September 2027. Like Lung Hours, it contains a lot of dream poems, but also a lot more hybrid work that crosses between prose poetry and microfiction. Some of them have been published in Does It Have Pockets! It follows the structure of sleep stages with the sections: Hypnagogic, Insomnia, REM/Dreams, Lucid Dreams, Nightmares, and Hypnopompic. After that book, I have another manuscript of ecopoetry I have to whittle down, and I’m working on other poems right now for a manuscript with a loose theme of houses/architecture.
8. What hobbies/activities/experiences fill your cup of words?
Sleeping, dreaming, walking in nature (I live by a river with bald eagles), looking at art, parenting and family, true crime podcasts, reading other poets' and fiction writers’ work, prompts from generative workshops online, researching odd facts and etymologies, theories and philosophies, miniatures, mythology, horror books and movies, books like the Oxford English Dictionary and Word Menu. Sylvia Plath, Marosa DiGiorgio, Joyelle McSweeney, Charles Simic, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Leonora Carrington, David Lynch, Hozier…
9. What question do you wish we would have asked?
I’ve always wanted to answer Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Questionnaire.” Especially the question: “What is the scariest animal?” My answer would be “humans.”
10. How can readers find more of your work and where is the best place to order your new book?
My website: https://www.jessicapurdy.com/
Gunpowder Press: https://gunpowderpress.com/product/lung-hours/
Lung Hours, available from Gunpowder Press: https://gunpowderpress.com/product/lung-hours/
I like to ride on things that shouldn’t be ridden
At the rodeo I volunteered to be thrown off the donkey. The clown led the audience in mocking my fall. How could I blame him? I hid inside the mouth of the big yellow demolition machine and rode it down into the abandoned house. Together we bit into the neon green Fuck Bitches graffiti on the old living room’s sheetrock. It’s okay because my hands are too soft to crush anything alive or dead. We tore its bones out and the insulation came up pink and frothing like lungs. The sun was hot on the top of my head, and the birds didn’t know what to do with this new information. They were flying so small and panicked. Dozens of trees lay hacked to death. Vines had tried a kind of embrace. I’ve ridden the Ferris Wheel hanging by my sweaty knees. I had to rely on my body to hold me. My hair hung down and tangled in the wind and the lights of this town. The muddy ground was littered with wrappers and cups. I’m always trying to ride a bicycle at night. I’ve figured out how to lie down and look at the stars while pedaling. The path so familiar, I navigate by sound and sky. It’s the old neighborhood and nothing can harm me.
lover lover over and over
this morning of the sixth day of illness there’s so much I’m missing and this bird outside singing lover lover over and over and I don’t know who is singing it sighing it like we can just repeat ourselves replicate in terms of devotion of nest building of songs that flirt or warn or chide when all night the rain poured onto my floor as I slept and fever sweat poured out of my body into cotton nightclothes and I dreamed of recliners and cars parked just so others could inch by and one driver decided she’d make the others wait and wait and she didn’t care and dug in her heels and the recliner was also a vehicle and I decided I didn’t want to listen to that woman in the dream anymore and woke up to this bird I can’t name by its song all this emerging I’m missing this warmth the kind that’s new in April and haven’t I seen this green before this winging past my window this daytime moon and nights of rain and still what wouldn’t I have had I not been through it the days marked by hyping and dancing and shouting where is that bird I can only hear I look to the trees and the sun glares off the windows clouds cover over this haze in a fevered mind forgetting what it’s like to notice the feathers that make me want to be a better person loss of taste and smell but still there’s a feeling of smell a sweetness on the part of the tongue that lets you know you’re still in a world you can recognize despite the losses
Incubus
In my dream I ate lettuce so green and crispy I drooled. I swallowed the demon in its folds and went back to visit my old apartment. On the porch the screen door looked so vivid I opened it to make sure it still slammed to satisfy. The sound brought me back so hard. I’d offer money to take that screen door home. I thanked the occupants for not kicking me out. They let me look for my bedroom but instead I found a whole new building like an annex. Man did I miss that screen door’s smack. Beyond the door I could see the sky was turning pink over the river. It was so lush and hidden in plain sight. Behind me were the clocks and a telephone. I felt them there but didn’t see. The demon I had choked down could make me orgasm at the sight of a slick sky. I bucked against the pain of that remembered door’s slam.
Jessica Purdy is the author of six books of poetry including Lung Hours, chosen by Marsha de la O as a winner of Gunpowder Press’ Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize. Her chapbook The Adorable Knife: Poems based on The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Grey Book Press) received the NH Writers' Project People's Choice Award. Her poems and micro-fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Spiritual Literature, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Micro-Fiction. Her poems have appeared in Does It Have Pockets, Sixth Finch, Action, Spectacle, About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. She lives in New Hampshire.
