Through the persona of Cora Fry, a wife and mother living in a small New Hampshire town, Rosellen Brown explores the ambivalent ties of love, loyalty, marriage, and family in a series of related poems. This volume includes the entire text of Cora Fry (1977), a kind of dramatic monologue, written in spare, simple lines, which describes the young woman's daily life and troubled marriage. A sequel of newer poems, Cora Fry's Pillow Book (1994), confronts the challenges that come with a woman's growth toward middle age, reflecting an older Cora's place in her family, community, and the larger world.
The narrator of Cora Fry's Pillow Book, Cora Fry, is a housewife who suffers from an unhappy, unfulfilling marriage and who watches her children grow old and move away with a sense of desperate melancholy. The book is set up as a series of poems, but really, to understand them, you need to read the book in the order it's presented because it's a story of this woman's life. Overcast with imagery from New England, minor characters, and flashbacks to her childhood, Cora Fry's Pillow Book made me examine the parts of my life I found the most haunting and empowered me to instill change where I felt dissatisfied. Who wants to live a life like Cora Fry?
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