Jessica Purdy is the author of Lung Hours which won The Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize in 2026 from Gunpowder Press. STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate, 2017 and 2018), The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), You're Never the Same (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023), and Learning the Names (Finishing Line Press, 2015). The Adorable Knife won the 2025 NH Writers' Project People's Choice Award for Poetry. Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for Poetry. Her poem won the 1st place prize for Odd Pocket Press' first contest 2026. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry from Emerson College. She has worked as an art teacher and a writing teacher. Currently, she teaches Poetry Workshops and Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University and at Noble High School, North Berwick, Maine. In 2024 she attended the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing on a fellowship. 2015, she was a featured reader at the Abroad Writers’ Conference in Dublin, Ireland. Her poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best Spiritual Literature, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. Her flash fiction has been nominated for Best Micro Fiction. Her poetry, flash fiction, and reviews appear in Sixth Finch, Does It Have Pockets, Book of Matches, About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, The Night Heron Barks, SoFloPoJo, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. Anthologies include Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press), Props: Poetic Intros, Praises, Co-Conspiracies, Pairings, Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle), Nancy Drew Anthology (Silver Birch), and Bread & Poetry (Bee Monk). She was the 2019 Esther Buffler Poet-in-Residence at Portsmouth High School in New Hampshire. She was poetry editor for the anthology, Ten Piscataqua Writers 2022.
Recent Publications
Book: Lung Hours
Chapbook: You're Never the Same: Ekphrastic Poems
Chapbook: The Adorable Knife: Poems after the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
Book: Sleep in a Strange House
Book: STARLAND
Chapbook: Learning the Names
Poems published in
Books
Lung Hours: Winner of The Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize (Gunpowder Press, 2026)
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Praise for Lung Hours
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 as 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)
Flashing in the pink seconds in Jessica Purdy’s new poetry collection
New Hampshire-based poet Jessica Purdy’s new book, Lung Hours (Gunpowder), winner of the Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize, holds poems for when you’re up too early or awake too late, there in the insomniac seethe, the edge-blurred netherworld, “awakened by a fire / in the forest I’m lost inside.” In this fuzzed place between dream and not-dream, Purdy is precise, tracking that territory with curiosity and night-visioned wisdom. What means harm? When will harm come? Is there a place it won’t? No, seems to be the answer. Or maybe only in dreams, where “it’s the old neighborhood and nothing can harm me.” Beasts appear and retreat, coyotes, turkey vultures, chimera of other kinds, and the poet lays her head on men’s chests “as if maybe I’d hear the monster in them dying.” The moon moves, the creatures move, time moves, and we ride on its back (or it rides on ours). “In spring we wait,” Purdy writes, exactly capturing the season. “Can’t say I’m not impatient / for the season to hurry up and change.” Life thumps behind Purdy’s lines, its angers and fears and awes and loves, “the wonder of this heaven on earth.” “I flash,” she writes, “in that pink second before earth turns, / pulling the ocean back blue to its chest.” These pink seconds collect, the lung hours pass, we flash and flail within them, and Purdy wakes us up to this luminous, fearsome place. “I’m asking / for your good news.”
—Nina MacLaughlin, author of Wake, Siren; Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice
You're Never the Same: Ekphrastic Poems (Seven Kitchens Press Summer Kitchen Series, 2023)
The Adorable Knife: Poems after The "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death" by Frances Glessner Lee (Grey Book Press, 2023)
Read the Review in The Boston Globe by Nina MacLaughlin
The Adorable Knife wins NH Writers' Project People's Choice Award
Murder in the House: The "Nutshells" of Frances Glessner Lee (Buttonhook Press, 2022)
Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate Books, 2018)
Praise for Sleep in a Strange House
You will not catch a wink of sleep when reading Jessica Purdy’s most recent collection, Sleep in a Strange House where both body and soul wrestle with what it means to be at home. Purdy’s poems are brooding, sexual, surreal, and grounded. And they are exquisite. She places the domestic side by side with the horrific, where ideas are percolating beneath what appear to be flat surfaces. She jolts us awake with juxtaposed lines such as, "I am making a cake. I am making a heart/for my dad.” And “The odds of being injured/are the same as the impossibility of belonging.” Ideas and images abound. The best poems pose questions that go unanswered and hold disparate ideas with equanimity exemplified by “The Lump in my Throat Appears without Warning” and “In What Room of the Soul do Moments Go." It’s a dark journey, but not all is despair. The collection ends with a voice akin to song. No flinching. No answers. Pure poetry.
Mimi White, author of The Last Island
“Nothing disturbs me quite like madness,” asserts the speaker of Jessica Pudy’s poem, “After Reading Plath.” But not since Sylvia Plath’s poems about motherhood in Ariel have I encountered such a deeply, deliciously deranged expression of the disturbances of being a mother and a self in our disturbed and deranged world as in Purdy’s aptly named collection, Sleep in A Strange House. In dreams and out of them, this brutally frank confrontation with the work of parenting (parenting both one’s self and one’s children) talks back to those who would reduce mothering to a series of quaint conditionals. Talks back in a timbre that is memorable for its mettle, in a voice that is at once hypnotic and homespun, in craft that spars with a sly bravura, and in lines that joust with disquieting fondness.
Tom Daley, author of House You Cannot Reach: Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems
STARLAND (Nixes Mate Books, 2017)
Praise for STARLAND
From the trapdoors and “spy/code” that once enchanted her while reading Nancy Drew, to bumblebees struck by frost “still sucking from the cups/ of blossoms,” Jessica Purdy feels the pulse of mystery underlying ordinary life. Purdy negotiates the bumpy terrain of responsibility, loneliness, dreams, and estrangement in poems that often begin in the natural world and end with meditations on her place in the family landscape. Cover to cover, STARLAND is a complex, deeply felt, and finely written book.
Joyce Peseroff, author of Know Thyself
While the poems in STARLAND ultimately explore transcendence and transformation, they are not afraid to re-draw and blur the many fine lines between reality and dream. Between the imagination and language. In doing so, they situate the reader on those lines, wise with their questions and humorous with their doubts. This is a book of poems by a poet who knows the world is made up of questions, and that all the questions between “Did Jesus really exist?”, and / “Who made these mittens?” are not only equal, but wise in the asking alone. This is also a poet who knows, “Nothing will happen today / or everything I fear might―”. Reading these wise poems, one walks away feeling less isolated walking their own blurred lines, and glad to meet a fellow traveler along the way.
S Stephanie - author of So This Is What It Has Come To
Learning the Names (Finishing Line Press, 2015)
Praise for Learning the Names
While the poems in Jessica Purdy's Learning the Names are armed with a reality made in the image of those most overshadowed of gods they more often than not move and unfold with the logic and intensity of dreams, multi-filing and lifting off from these infinitely-felt memories, their assorted voices just coming to, recovering, what once was thought unfailingly lost, not only by naming but re-christening, striking a-new, thus attaining this unseen kind of omen-status, so camera-ready and ever-inventive, so dramatically and menacingly available at times, they gain one a sort of newly sung reason, understanding
Mark DeCarteret, author of FLAP (Finishing Line Press, 2011)
Jessica Purdy charges everyday acts with the power of transformation. Outside her door, the wing feathers of a pigeon are 'splayed open in a version of praying hands;' walking alone, lust becomes 'like a blue river churning dirt,/ a river that dumps itself/ depleted at the origin.' Questions of love, mortality, and the strangeness of being sing through these beautifully observed poems of discovery and reinvention.
Joyce Peseroff, author of Eastern Mountain Time (Carnegie Mellon, 2006)