“Aristotle claimed in the Poetics that learning gives the human animal the liveliest pleasure. Breakfast in Fur celebrates this strange gift. The pleasures of this book surprise and delight as they defy the conventions of self-searching and introspection. Jessica Murray plumbs discordant sources in our strange world, from pornography to ceramic art, from marriage to childbirth to friendship to fleeting glance. This is a spiritual autobiography of great daring that celebrates the well-made mistake rather than protecting the untaken chance. At its best moments, it is coldly wild, and full of vivid experiment.”
—Katie Peterson, coauthor of Life in a Field and author of A Piece of Good News
“Breakfast in Fur offers its readers not just a view into life deeply examined but also life deeply imagined. These powerful poems masterfully make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, raising epistemological and ethical questions as they often hover in that hour before birdsong when the borders between dream and reality and life and art seem to waver. Murray reminds us that to be fully awake and human is to travel to the interior only to find there is no interior. Always an elsewhere, further off, deeper in.
—Kathleen Graber, author of The Eternal City
The poems in Jessica Murray's Breakfast in Fur battle against participation requirements—the rules for being cool, for being a woman, a wife, a person wanting to think about art, the participation requirements for sex, for being a whale, for being a poet. All of these conditions designed to reinforce a feeling of failure in anyone without privilege enough to pass. At their best, these poems are Joan of Arc, but instead of riding a Percheron mare, they’re on a skateboard, saving poetry from its Hundred Year War with personal rhetoric.