Wordy Birds

Late Wife

Original airdate: March 23, 2007

About the Book: (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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Drive Like Hell

Original airdate: March 2, 2007

About the Book: Wanting desperately to be behind the wheel, Luke Fulmer counts down the days to his sixteenth birthday, when he can finally get his license. Unfortunately, the first thing he does with it is “borrow” his neighbor’s car. When he is pulled over and found in possession of an air pistol, a ski mask, a stolen TV, and a bag of pot, the unforgiving local magistrate takes scissors to his license and vows to lock him up if he ever stands in front of her again. So with an absent father and a mother descending into alcoholism, he moves in with his older brother, Nick, an easygoing ex-con who wants to steer Luke onto the straight and narrow. In the summer that follows, Luke contends with a kleptomaniac girlfriend, a duffel bag full of cocaine, and the realization that he must save his family from themselves, even as he plots to beat a path out of town.

In his hilarious, unforgettable debut — with everything from stock car racing to drug dealing — Dallas Hudgens brilliantly evokes Southern culture in a tale that is raucous and wrenching, funny and wise.

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