ALTOONA, Pa. — Erin Murphy, professor of English at Penn State Altoona, has published a new collection of documentary poetry about labor and employment.
“Human Resources” features poems about global, national and historical labor matters. Subjects range from migrant farm workers in the Southwest United States to cell phone manufacturers in China. The persona, erasure and memoir poems highlight the human beings behind profits and policies.
A book launch and reading will be held on Wednesday, June 18, at 7 p.m. on Zoom.
Writer Brian Turner describes “Human Resources” as “a love song to the profound work of survival, the labor required to see it done,” adding that the poems “examine social and environmental injustice — while also illuminating the tenacity housed within the blood and bone of people who rarely make it into verse. Murphy’s poems ask the crucial questions for our time — questions that for far too long have been left ringing in exhausted hands.”
Murphy is in the process of editing an anthology of poems about labor and employment. “The Book of Jobs: Poems About Work” will be published by “ONE ART: a journal of poetry” in the fall.
Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen previous books, chapbooks and anthologies, with additional books forthcoming from Harbor Editions and Wesleyan University Press. She is the poet laureate of Blair County, poetry editor of “The Summerset Review” and Penn State’s inaugural Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow for the Big Ten Academic Alliance.
