Skeleton Woman Buys the Ticket by Hester L. Furey

Poets have more patience than the rest of us with how it takes a while, really a lifetime, for the world to disclose some of its better secrets. You have to know how to look or to listen to what rustles insistently in the understory of the soul that Hester L. Furey calls poet radio. Furey writes with a fortune-teller’s second sight about a souvenir leaf, a foundling kitten in a parking lot, the way your own skin can speak back to you. Read these poems and witness for yourself how her specific locational coordinates in the sea of human history can help you map your own.  

–Cynthia Shearer, author of The Wonder Book of the Air and The Celestial Jukebox

With these new poems, Hester L. Furey gives us powerful incantations for a dark and troubled time. Over and over, the myths we know to be truths guide us through unsettled loves and unbridled lusts to answers that lie within the terrifying and undying natural world. Skeleton Woman Buys the Ticket is a secret map showing us the way out of a strange and hostile landscape we didn’t even know surrounds us.

–R.S. Williams, author of “The Lipstick Queen” and Songs My Father Barely Knew

Hester L. Furey is a storyteller unafraid of embarrassing details.  She weaves them into poems as fine as dreams that seem to wriggle out of deep crevices full of ambiguities.  Her stories are about the interior geography of being a woman.  Her poems are told from the inside out.  They may scare some readers.  Others may choose to read them only in daylight.  But choose to read them.  They invite us to deepen and better navigate our own dark places.  

–Franklin Abbott, author of Mortal Love: Selected Poems, 1971-1998, Pink Zinnia: Poems and Stories; editor of Boyhood: Growing Up Male; New Men, New Minds: Breaking Male Tradition; and Men and Intimacy: Personal Accounts Exploring the Dilemmas of Modern Male Sexuality