Claudia Emerson
23 Mar
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.
Listen to the show:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
