| 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.
Claudia Emerson is also the author of the poetry
books Pharaoh, Pharaoh and Pinion: An Elegy, both
published in Dave Smith's Southern Messenger Poets series.
Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah,
TriQuarterly, New England Review, and other journals.
The recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library
of Congress and fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, she is
Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University
of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
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