About the Author

Claudia Emerson published six poetry collections with LSU Press, including Late Wife, Figure Studies, and The Opposite House. A professor of English and member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Emerson served as the poet laureate of Virginia and won numerous awards for teaching and writing -- including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry -- before her death in 2014.

Reviews

"Smart, intense, satisfying, and approachable." -- Newsweek"The sustained quality of her accomplishment, poem by poem, is rare.... The voices... are authentic, their con- flicts and complexities universal." -- Georgia Review"One of the most honored, decorated, and revered poets inVirginia history." -- Richmond Times-Dispatch"Emerson's poems... are characteristic of the poet at her most human, by offering the subjective as human, its freakiness intact, and by making us believe that this offer- ing is the most poetic of documentary rituals." -- Cortland Review

" Smart, intense, satisfying, and approachable. Newsweek The sustained quality of her accomplishment, poem by poem, is rare. . . . The voices . . . are authentic, their con- flicts and complexities universal. Georgia Review One of the most honored, decorated, and revered poets in Virginia history. Richmond Times-Dispatch Emerson s poems . . . are characteristic of the poet at her most human, by offering the subjective as human, its freakiness intact, and by making us believe that this offer- ing is the most poetic of documentary rituals. Cortland Review"