About the Author

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

Reviews

Claudia Emerson's carefully made, thoughtful, and unsparing last poems have a kind of wildness in them, a feeling of being released, a fatefulness that unspools in ways that are both surprising and inevitable. This book is her final and finest achievement.--Edward Hirsch

Emerson never tried to overwhelm the reader with a lot of curtain chewing and scene stealing. She was a solitary, an off-in-the-corner type, a classic observer--as observant as a sniper. . . . In her last months, Emerson added much to an art that was delicate but indomitable.--William Logan, New Criterion