Mary Ann Samyn is the author of three other collections of poetry: Rooms by the Sea, Captivity Narrative, and Inside the Yellow Dress. She lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, with her husband, poet Gerry LaFemina, and teaches in the MFA program at West Virginia University.

About Purr:

"If you lower the volume on the usual poetry noises and tune your intelligence to the exquisite frequences of Mary Ann Samyn's third book, Purr, you will hear the contemporary. 'Then language finished and set me down. / I had been performed. I had been emptied,' she writes and, as is so often the case in the dazzling collection, the poetry hovers between irony and true despair. Nuance and variety infuse these pages. This is poetry that is hip, elegant, sorrowful, witty, and new. Don't read it at your peril."
—Lynn Emanuel

"The texture and shape of the world, described so vividly as to bring eyesight to the blind. And the Eliotesque mutterings, the stage whispers, the blips of the overheard and the internal musings of the mind. Here is a poetry built of sensory data so sharply honed as to make even the mundane microfibre or the quotidian stone path a journey, a finding, a deep understanding of the world. And who couldn't love a book where Doris Day and Nancy Sinatra are as essential and as mysterious as saints?"
—D. A. Powell