| Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Late
Wife
Poet Claudia Emerson begins Figure Studies with a
twenty-five poem lyric sequence called "All Girls School,"
offering intricate views of a richly imagined boarding school
for girls. Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the
girls themselves as they collectively "school"—or refuse to—the
poems explore ways girls are "trained" in the broadest sense
of the word.
"Gossips," the second section, is a shorter sequence narrated
by women as they talk about other women in a variety of isolations;
these poems, told from the outside looking in, highlight a
speculative voicing of all the gossips cannot know. In "Early
Lessons," the third section, children narrate as they also
observe similarly solitary women, the children's innocence
allowing them to see in farther than the gossips can. The
fourth section offers studies of women and men in situations
where gender, with all of its complexities, figures powerfully.
The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late
Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson's place among
contemporary poetry's elite.
"The Mannequin above Main Street Motors"
When the only ladies' dress shop closed,
she was left on the street for trash, unsalvageable,
one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg
at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee
and blonde wig, so they helped themselves to her
on a lark—drunken impulse—and for years kept
her
leaning in a corner, beside an attic
window, rendered invisible. The dusk
was also perpetual in the garage below,
punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close
over the engines. An oily grime coated
the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted
stock-car drivers, women in dated swimsuits,
even their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted
there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel
conceding to that place a greater, echoing
sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained,
back turned forever to the dark storage
behind her, gaze leveled just above
anyone's who could have looked up
to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing—
her expression still reluctant figure for it.
Claudia Emerson is also the author of Late
Wife, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, and Pharaoh,
Pharaoh. 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 holds the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry
at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
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