Late Wife: Poems (Signed/First Edition)

Emerson, Claudia

ISBN 10: 0807130834 / ISBN 13: 9780807130834

Published by LSU Press, 2005

About this Item

Signed. First Edition. 2nd Printing. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2006. Unread, unclipped, and unmarked. Additional images available upon request. (see attached photos).

Seller Inventory # ABE-1762825213653

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Late Wife: Poems (Signed/First Edition)
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807130834
• ISBN 13: 9780807130834
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples’ respective losses.

The most personal of Claudia Emerson’s poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

About the Author

Claudia Emerson’s poetry collections include Late Wife, Figure Studies, Secure the Shadow, and The Opposite House. Before her death in 2014, she was professor of English and a member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University. Emerson served as poet laureate of Virginia and won numerous awards for teaching and writing, including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.