“House of Jars: Poems” — New Poetry from Hester L. Furey
The work Furey’s doing in her House of Jars poem cycle is her most sophisticated and ambitious yet.”– Steve Davenport, author of Bruise Songs
Frayed Edge Press is pleased to announce the publication of “House of Jars: Poems” a new poetry collection by Hester L. Furey.
House of Jars weaves together three sequences of poems: the journey of a character called Skeleton Woman through a mental health crisis triggered by menopause and environmental illness, the stories of a pantheon of modernist doctor-writers whose mental health struggles changed their writing, and the Conjuring Moses cycle.
From the start, House of Jars invites us into a world in which multiple timelines erupt into each other. Sometimes a broken-down old house turns out to be a portal to an underworld, and a spider becomes a guru. The collection centers on the experience of not knowing what is real, of living a long time with a version of reality that is not easy to verify but that occupies a lot of psychic real estate. Personal experience is interwoven with historical research into the lives and challenges of such figures as Gertrude Stein, Ruth Benedict, Rachel Carson, Robert Oppenheimer, and others. Much like Moses, Skeleton Woman spends some time in a wilderness, but hers is hidden inside what looks like an ordinary world. Encountering the weight of collective grief, the omnipresence of magic, the ever-present origin, she comes away with very few certainties.
Hester L. Furey is a poet and literary historian, a specialist in archival research and hidden histories. A native of south Georgia in the United States, she developed a rich sense of appreciation for the absurd from a very young age. Like many Southerners, she is constantly aware of the past in the present and lives in a world populated by the living and the dead. She began writing as a child, inspired by the journalists who investigated the Watergate scandal, her love of encyclopedias, and poetry’s alchemical ability to transform personal experience into something of worth. She is the author of Little Fish: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Skeleton Woman Buys the Ticket (Finishing Line Press, 2019), and the editor of Dictionary of Literary Biography 345: American Radical and Reform Writers, Second Series (Bruccoli-Clark-Layman, 2008). She currently resides in Atlanta.
Early readers of the book have had this to say:
“…a multidimensional journey into history and psyche…After reading a few of the pieces aloud to myself, I could hear a concert in this collection of poems—multiple songs from scherzo to fugue to songs of love and loss and longing…One sees the cracks in all the characters, but one also sees the adhesives binding those cracks, however imperfectly.”–Bryant O’Hara, author of The Ghettobirds
“One night, instead of sleeping, I began reading House of Jars, and could not stop until I had read all of it. I was, again, enchanted by Lee’s world and words…focused more upon a pantheon of brilliant human beings that have long fascinated creative thinkers and historians, including me.”–Alicia Bay Laurel, author of Living on the Earth
“The work Furey’s doing in her House of Jars poem cycle is her most sophisticated and ambitious yet. Madness, both as crisis and as passage, is the cycle’s primary theme, which Furey handles masterfully via multiple characters…If House of Jars is both collection (assemblage) and building (edifice), Furey is both curator and architect of a fascinating set of spaces peopled richly by historical characters ranging from William Carlos Williams to Walter Mosley, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict, from Rachel Carson to Dr. Seuss and beyond.”–Steve Davenport, author of Bruise Songs
“House of Jars: Poems” officially launches December 3, 2024 and may be purchased directly from the press at: https://www.frayededgepress.com/store/p147/House_of_Jars.html#/ The book is also available through major online booksellers, including Amazon https://www.amazon.com/House-Jars-Poems-Hester-Furey/dp/1642510599/ and Barnes & Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/house-of-jars-hester-l-furey/1146612788?ean=9781642510591and most library book jobbers, including Ingram and Baker & Taylor.
Frayed Edge Press is a small independent press located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which specializes in publishing marginalized voices, forgotten history, overlooked literature in translation, and works that wrestle with important questions impacting contemporary society. For more information about the press, visit our website at: https://www.frayededgepress.com/
Title: “House of Jars: Poems”
Author: Hester L. Furey
Format: 6×9; vii, 73 p.
ISBN: 9781642510591
Price: $16.00 (pbk.)
Link: https://www.frayededgepress.com/house_of_jars.html
Categories: Poetry, Women’s literature
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