Claudia Emerson has published five poetry collections with LSU Press, including Late Wife, Figure Studies, and Secure the Shadow. A professor of English and member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Emerson has served as the poet laureate of Virginia and won numerous awards for teaching and writing, including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
"In her deft, unflinching, and fiercely gorgeous new collection,
The Opposite House, Claudia Emerson exposes what language will
salvage and what remains unsalvageable. Where 'the fact/ of every
door/remains/ reference to/an antecedent made/vague-' we find
clarity: in a space both familiar and alternate, like that of the
elegized 'Telephone Booth, ' 'robbed of confession, apology,
despair.' Whether in spider eggs blasted into space 'to see if they
would hatch, ' or in an embalmer's passion for his work, 'art-far
beyond balm-levitation, almost/that immaculate a suspense, exact/
and abstract, the thing itself made other, / italicized, ' one
finds throughout, the threat of oblivion set hard against our
longing. Emerson, like 'The Ocularist, ' becomes 'architect/not of
form/but of function, /not of object/but of the seen-/self,
enticing it not/to look away."-Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, author of
Open Interval
"The poems in this dark, wholly absorbing book hover around
absence, the absence left by death, by grief, by the fading of
childhood memory, by the decline of a small community, and by the
larger, inevitable sweep of time. The book begins in specific time
and place and spirals out to vaster attitudes and claims, to
reference Dickinson, a presiding spirit in this book. And yet, the
absence conjured here is never emptiness: it is a thing itself, a
firm reality that happens to defy words-almost. I have read and
re-read this haunting book and will continue to do so. It
mesmerizes and enchants, and convinces the reader that one is in
the presence of a master and a deeply human poet."-Maurice Manning,
author of The Common Man
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