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The poems in The Year of Yellow Butterflies combine elements of surrealism and wry humor as well as riffs on autobiography, science fiction and unhinged nostalgia. Fuhrman explores the relationship between the mind and the body and playfully examines how gender, technology, capitalism and culture affect this relationship.
"In this extraordinary book, Fuhrman seamlessly oscillates between illusion and reality, childhood and maturity, the animal kingdom (a "babbling...walrus," a "creaky bird," a "bunny rabbit") and technology ("a baby's rebooted brains," "Virgil's internet"). She gives new life to the prose poem. The Year of Yellow Butterflies is killer--not only Fuhrman's best book to date, but her most poignant. "--Noelle Kocot
With the impish charm of an illusionist and the dazzling patter of a tummler in a Borscht Belt resort, Joanna Fuhrman suspends our expectations in The Year of Yellow Butterflies, sending us head over heels into zones of cosmic and technological bafflement and sudden parabolic grief. "Stand on one foot while the world pretends to end. // The beauty almost hurts / if you want it to," she writes, and we do want it to, in this book full of brilliant predicaments and pleasures. ” —Rachel Loden