Black Arts & Culture Feature:
Reviewed by Monica Robinson
House of Jars
by Hester L. Furey
Frayed Edge Press
December 2024, 72 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1642510591
Rife with revolutions and references, Hester L. Furey’s House of Jars stares unflinchingly into the scrying pool of post-modernist exploration. Close examination reveals a time-shy collection that cobbles together unlikely subjects to deliriously incredible effect. As a student of literature looking towards a career as an archivist myself, it’s exciting to see Furey’s “archivally based academic work in literary history” (Furey, v) mesh with poetry in what I feel is an incredibly successful effort to “preserve overlooked nuances of 20th century human experience.” (vi)
I must admit that when I encountered this text for the first time, I was flung far out of my realm. House of Jars is brilliant in so many ways, and though I have long been an intimate friend of poetry, I was at first daunted by the intellectual challenges that this work presented. The opportunity to explore this work served doubly as another step forward along my academic journey, and once I learned to speak its language, I found House of Jars to be a delightfully rewarding challenge, to which I hope I rose valiantly.
How fitting, then, that I discovered something of myself between the clever twists and turns of these poems. As Furey has broken her work into three distinct sequences of poems unified as “a yogic journey, an examination of attachments” (vi), it seems only fair that I dissect them here in equal fashion. Furey says of this work:
The book dwells 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 still occupies a lot of psychic real estate.
The first narrative follows the journey of a character called Skeleton Woman through a mental health crisis, based loosely on the author’s experiences throughout menopause. Though a general collapse of reality is a unifying theme across this work, it presents here in the shared experiences of a woman discarded by society; one of many. Brimming with mothers and matriarchs, this section tells of neuroses I find all too familiar: phantom bugs, fearful contamination, loss of stories, loss of time.
The narrator also heralds many of my idols across history here: Tzipporah, Alice B. Toklas, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston—each seeking to reclaim themselves or else to simply understand their internal warfare in an external whirlwind of destruction. This is not dissimilar, I feel, to the impenetrable now, and therefore strings a lifeline between our modern world and their own. The inclusion and characterization of these women feels necessary to achieve the cross-cultural examination that the narrator appears to hope for, and the choir of these women’s voices collectively compose the singular voice of the Skeleton Woman.
I would be remiss not to mention the titular poem, “House of Jars”, the steadfast beating heart of this strand of storytelling. These opening lines hold, for me, a simple and unflinching truth: the prison of home and of the body itself—safe from the outside and yet held captive in a drudgery of repetition. I delight, too, in the phrase “mycelium wars” and its many connotations; the thought of mysterious growth in dark places.
Home from the mycelium wars,
I strip, bathe, wash every conceivable surface.
My life fits between the washer and the dryer.
I know I can’t go on like this.
Marching right along, then, this collection carries into its second thematic distinction the narrative of the Skeleton Woman and her struggles with societal restrictions and mental illness, bringing her individual experiences into a broader scope. The passage of time invites a host of medical malpractice, dim history, intertwining journeys, a search for self amid a broken empire. Characterized by storms, floods, famines, and again, infestations, this thread paves the way for the heart of the collection. Where the first section rolled out the doormat, this section crawls beneath your skin and nests there.
Not here to save a dying culture—
no one could do that, and truth be told, even she was a miner of sorts—
here to find her own lost country, become one of the gods,
answer her own prayer.
It makes sense that the starting seed of this narrative was an attempt to draw parallels between “modernists who had insect-born illnesses or mental health crises provoked by insect encounters” (vi). In fact, the language from poem to poem throughout this second narrative evokes the cloying sensation of infestation, the words as visceral as they are rife with meaning. Moreover, the literary and contextual connections made here ring undoubtedly true, though the interrogation or even mere existence of them may never once have crossed the reader’s mind until now—they too, lingering thoughts, climb beneath the skin.
The bulk of this collection lies in the third and final narrative, that of “Conjuring Moses” and invoking the gods of old alongside familiar characters of the new age. Furey describes this section as being “the center of the book” (vi), and I must wholeheartedly agree. The previously explored struggles reach a breaking point here, as the narrator brings all that she has written before into the light of centuries worth of study and answer-seeking, at the heart of which is the integral figure, Moses.
Moses, at the core of the Abrahamic religions and an influential figure in many others, is defined here as a question being studied and meditated upon for many centuries—studied, even, by the very same modernists and Skeleton Women introduced to us throughout other parts of the collection. All of it connects and eventually coalesces in not only the existence but the legacy of Moses and what that has meant throughout the collective lived experiences of humanity. The work finds its closure here, but questions of morality and memory remain for the reader to ponder alone.
In my opinion, the narrator’s inclusion of so many recognizable (or slightly less than) figures is integral to this collection. Though poetic in nature, the narrative remains—the stories woven and warped of names we understand and figures we have missed our chance to meet contextualize the collection as a distinct reworking of history beneath the hands of an archivist seeking meaning, seeking patterns, seeking, most of all, to understand the story for herself. Though I am remiss to compare one poet to the next, it would be negligent of me not to mention this collection’s strong conversation with the winding works of Stein or Ginsberg—culturally relevant, historically conscious, emotionally and intellectually curious.
My final comments must caution that this is not for the casual reader. The skillfully dense layers upon layers of references, knowledge, and language demand that you give your soul entirely to the dissection of this work, if only for a brief time. Yet I must also tell you that this sacrifice is not without reward. This is among those collections that shock, startle, and otherwise coerce your worldview into a new and at the same time strikingly familiar existence for which I believe you will be grateful, should you make the time.
About the reviewer: Monica Robinson is a Philadelphia based poet, author, artist, and occasional bookseller and reviewer. She is the author of Exit Wounds, EARTH IS FULL; GO BACK HOME, and to rule the desert, and has been published by Mookychick Mag, Ghost Orchid Press, and the NoSleep Podcast.
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