Background
Emerson, Claudia was born in 1957 in Chatham, Virginia, United States. Daughter of Claude and Mollie Emerson.
(Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In Late Wif...)
Winner of the 2006 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 the speaker's 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.
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(In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the v...)
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."
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Emerson, Claudia was born in 1957 in Chatham, Virginia, United States. Daughter of Claude and Mollie Emerson.
Bachelor in English, University Virginia, 1979. Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, University North Carolina, Greensboro, 1991.
Academy dean Chatham Hall, Chatham, Virginia, 1996—1998. Associate professor English University Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, since 1998. Board trustees Chatham Hall, Chatham, Virginia, 1998—2004.
(In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the v...)
(Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In Late Wif...)
Married Kent Ippolito, 2000.