In the "throw-things house" where the speaker of Patricia Colleen Murphy's debut collection Hemming Flames grows to adulthood, a father asks of his wife, "could you / try not to murder yourself / in front of the children." Murphy opens with Bolsheviks; her mother, a Stanford graduate, communist, a woman with mental illness; and the speaker finding her mother after another suicide attempt. This entry into the family is casual, the implication that it's a commonplace occurrence, that at the dinner table, peas passed in irritation, we come to that query and enter into a family with more to show than can fit in a dining room window peek, so the pane (pain) is thrown wide open.
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