Buxton Books is proud to host author Yvette R. Murray for a poetry reading to celebrate her book, Hush, Puppy. This is a free, in-store event! Email rsvp@buxtonbooks.com with your name and the number of your party reserve your spot.
About the Book:
In “Hush, Puppy” a neighborhood, a city and memories are more than just a neighborhood, a city and memories. “Hush, Puppy” is a call and response praise song to the antimony of being Black and Gullah and Southern in Charleston, South Carolina and the world. This chapbook explores familial, societal and community relationships with spice and a dash of humor. “Hush, Puppy” braids love and wrath into one lyrical plait. Meet “Hush, Puppy” at the intersection of the past and the future, sip the bitter tea of its history to explore where we are today.
About the Author:
Yvette R. Murray is an award-winning poet and writer. She has been published in Chestnut Review, Emrys Journal, Litmosphere, A Gathering Together, and others. She is the 2022 Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellow, a 2021 Best New Poet selection, a Watering Hole Fellow, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She is a board member of the South Carolina Writer’s Association and the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators.
Praise for Hush, Puppy:
“The past and the present are joined in the true Carolina of Yvette R. Murray‘s poems, and she has the bravery and the talent to make each poem a song that you cannot forget even if you try.”
–Samuel Hazo, founder International Poetry Forum
“In Yvette R. Murray‘s Hush, Puppy she becomes one with the Port City. This collection is a direct address, a love letter to Charleston from the black hand side. The poet takes readers on an intentional trek, while brilliantly negotiating the past, the present, and the future. With her, we leap the expanse from the Cypress tree centerpiece/ casting Gullah Geechee shadows/since 1685 to seeing the whole if only you would look. With these poems, we cannot look away. Our hearts become our ears as she rings the bell with her poetic manifestos.”
–Glenis Redmond, Poet Laureate, Greenville SC
“Hush, Puppy rocks, dances, strides, kicks, prances, and taps across pages that can barely contain such rich music. It is replete with heritage, history, family history, today’s news, and some language of the future not quite heard yet. But Yvette R. Murray hears it and gets it down pat. While you are nodding and tapping your feet you won’t notice her mastery of contemporary forms and methods like the ghazal, the pantoum, the bop, and the contrapuntal poem; you’ll be too busy enjoying these poems that you could almost dance to.”
–Richard Garcia, Author Of Porridge
“Yvette Murray offers a collection that is so shrimp and grits, so Gullah, so Battery, so Charleston. She invites us to taste, feel, and breathe her Charleston. She exercises her poetry muscles with traditional forms and lifts voices that Carolinians have heard all their lives. Let her be your tour guide through the pain and the joy. How grateful we are to share in her witness.”
–Dr. Len Lawson, PhD (He/him), Author of Chime (Get Fresh, 2019), Editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair, 2021), Assistant Professor of English, Newberry College