SOURCE: Parson-Nesbitt, Julie. Review of Cora Fry's Pillow Book, by Rosellen Brown. Belles Lettres 11, no. 1 (January 1996): 34.

In the following review, Parson-Nesbitt assesses the strengths of the poetry in Cora Fry's Pillow Book.

Novelist and poet Rosellen Brown refuses to allow her characters less than their difficult and contradictory humanity. Her new poetry collection [Cora Fry's Pillow Book] is narrated by the astute and unsentimental Cora Fry, a woman approaching middle age in a rural, working-class New England community.

The burden of being female, and how women cope, is news as daily as the mail Cora delivers. She describes a friend's extramarital affair with dry wit, and understands of a woman who cremates herself that she had “Nothing left of the world except a narrow strip of fury / on which, satisfied, / she struck the match.”

Cora and her neighbors accommodate to what feels like a suffocating narrowness—not so...