The Woman Behind You by Julie Fay

Marilyn Hacker recommends
The Woman Behind You, poems by Julie Fay: “Julie Fay’s
The Woman Behind You is at once a superb manifestation of the contemporary possibilities of lyric poetry and a sustained and gripping narrative of a late-twentieth-century woman’s life, exemplary in its specificities, picaresque in the geographic and erotic vicissitudes of its quest. Like one of the pluckier folk-tale heroines, Fay’s speaker travels long distances in search of her true home, her mother tongue. There are two powerful dialogues implicit here: between an adult daughter and her mother, between the American enduring a kind of exile in her own country and the expatriate conscious that she is most ‘American’ in the life she chose elsewhere: their counterpoint creates the book’s unique music, earthy and elegiac, generous in its discoveries.” (Pittsburgh)