Dive Bars & Empty Glasses
Dive Bars & Empty Glasses offers an unflinching exploration of the human experience at its most vulnerable. Through a collection of emotionally raw poems, Purdy examines the weight of regret, the ache of loneliness, the struggle with addiction, and the quiet desperation of a life that has not turned out as expected. These are poems about people searching for connection, wrestling with their demons, and trying to find a reason to keep moving forward when life feels impossibly heavy.
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Set against the familiar backdrop of dimly lit bars, empty houses, fading relationships, and restless nights, the collection explores the many ways people attempt to escape their pain. Alcohol, desire, self-destruction, and the pursuit of temporary relief offer moments of refuge, but rarely the comfort or connection the speaker truly needs. Beneath these struggles lies a deeper longing to be understood, to reclaim a sense of self, and to believe that something better might still be possible.
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Purdy does not shy away from difficult subjects, including depression, suicidal thoughts, fractured relationships, and the painful consequences of our choices. Yet these poems are not simply meditations on despair. They also capture the fragile persistence of hope: the courage to begin again after a relapse, the unexpected solidarity of strangers who share their struggles, and the possibility of walking away from the familiar darkness toward an uncertain future.
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At its heart, Dive Bars & Empty Glasses is a book about being human; about making mistakes, carrying loss, and learning to live with the things we cannot change. Honest, intimate, and often haunting, this collection invites readers to recognize something of themselves in the lives and longings of others. It is a reminder that even in our lowest moments, we are not beyond hope, and that sometimes the first step toward finding our way forward is simply acknowledging where we are.
Praise & Reviews
"There is a particular kind of loneliness that doesn't look like loneliness from the outside. You go to work, make conversation, sit with friends, pour yourself a drink, and get through another day. You might even laugh. But somewhere beneath the routine, something has been lost. The things that once mattered feel distant, the future has lost some of its color, and getting through the day has become a substitute for actually living it.
Purdy's Dive Bars & Empty Glasses spends much of its time in that space between surviving and living. Published in 2015, this collection of poems explores addiction, despair, regret, fractured relationships, self-destructive behavior, and the stubborn possibility of hope. It is a book that looks directly at some difficult corners of human experience, often without much interest in making them comfortable for the reader.
What I found most interesting about this collection is its recurring tension between wanting to escape pain and wanting desperately to feel alive. The speaker in these poems reaches for alcohol, physical sensation, fantasy, intimacy, and even the idea of death as ways of responding to an existence that has become difficult to bear. Yet the collection also contains moments of connection and recognition that suggest the possibility of something beyond that suffering."
— Angel Williams
"These are not poems of glamourized pain. They are documents of survival in real time. Poems that know what it means to live with suicidal ideation, to wake up simply because that is the expectation."
— Robert Neill