The First Daughter
poems by Margaret McMurtry
 
*Available for pre-order.*
 
Orison Books
paper  /  34 pp.  /  $14.00
ISBN: 978-1-949039-82-5
Publication Date: October 15, 2026
 
ABOUT THE BOOK
 
Margaret McMurtry's debut chapbook portrays the people and landscape of a working-class Appalachian childhood and young adulthood. Nowhere do these poems idealize, but portray others and self with unwavering honesty and precise insight. McMurtry's voice can unsettle as easily as it can soothe. Whatever the topic or tone, each poem makes its mark.
 
PRAISE
 
"In odes and elegies as uncompromising as they are tender, Margaret McMurtry reckons with perhaps the most difficult kind of origin story. Her speaker comes, she tells us, 'from dark places / where matchstick flowers and asters grow.' In other words, she can't stop finding beauty where she has been harmed, and she observes her people—in their suffering and their sweetness—with the same loving exactitude she lavishes on the landscape of the home place. The lyric and profane hold hands here because they must, because there is no other way to tell the truth about a legacy of suffering and succor, a world at once festering and in bloom. Here is a poet who refuses to stop witnessing and can't relinquish hope. Here is a book of lush and lucid poems that wound us and bandage the wound. I'm not sure what more we can want."
—Melissa Crowe, author of Abider
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 
Margaret McMurtry is a poet based in Hendersonville, NC, where she lives with her husband and two young sons. The First Daughter is her debut chapbook.