Cora Fry's Pillow Book

by Rosellen Brown

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374144028
• ISBN13: 9780374144029
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 179 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Subtle, Quiet, Powerful

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?