Claudia Emerson

A collection of poems in which the poet reminisces about the life she led with her first husband, describes the healing she went through after her divorce, and expresses her feelings toward her second husband, whose former wife died of cancer.

In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity. Alternating between the voices of Preacher and Sister, Pinion is narrated by the younger, surviving sister, Rose, in whose memory the now-gone family and farm vividly live on. Sister tells of her observances in day-to-day life in the 1920s and her struggle to take care of her father, grown brothers, and Rose-"the change-of-life baby"-after the death of her mother: "The hens had hidden their heads beneath / their wings; they blinded themselves as I dusted / the kneading bowl with flour sifted fine as silk, and so / I disappeared as I sank my fists into it." Preacher feels keenly the burden of running the farm and fears being the last one to live on the place: "I was held fast there, pinioned, not / dying, growing numb and light, wait-crazed / and finally calm." Both wrestle with a desire for independence and the duty to home they are bound to by birth; neither marries or leaves. "Pinion" is ultimately a wrenching elegy that Rose creates. She is the one who escaped, only to realize, "I survive them all, but I find I have become the house they keep."

Pharaoh, Pharaoh is a meditation on time, memory, inheritance, and the irony of loss - loss of one's land, of one's past, of love itself. With senses keenly attuned to every nuance of light and landscape, Claudia Emerson Andrews invests her lines with a scriptural fire in this debut collection. She captures equally and with apparent effortlessness the bewilderment of the culturally bereft in the "stuttered eloquence" of an auctioneer, and the evanescence of appearances in the image of a dying firefly "coughing up light."

This posthumous volume of poetry from Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson explores the suspended state of existence that illness imposes upon its sufferers - what she calls the "impossible bottle." With a strong will and a self-deprecating awareness of the instinct to seek meaning in metaphor, she confronts the indignities, fears, and moments of grace in a struggle with cancer. Her poems forge unlikely connections between the present reality and memories of the past, such as an MRI scan conjuring up images of a June expedition through a tunnel under a Maryland mountain. Rooted equally in the sterility of the hospital and the vitality of the natural world, Impossible Bottle mines the trappings of illness, showing how disease attempts to rob us of our humanity even as it reminds us of our mortality. -- from dust jacket.