Impossible Bottle - (Southern Messenger Poets) by Claudia Emerson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This posthumous volume of poetry from Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson explores the suspended state of existence that illness imposes upon its sufferers -- what she calls the "impossible bottle." With a strong will and a self-deprecating awareness of the instinct to seek meaning in metaphor, she confronts the indignities, fears, and moments of grace in a struggle with cancer. Her poems forge unlikely connections between the present reality and memories of the past, such as an MRI scan conjuring up images of a June expedition through a tunnel under a Maryland mountain.
Rooted equally in the sterility of the hospital and the vitality of the natural world, Impossible Bottle mines the trappings of illness, showing how disease attempts to rob us of our humanity even as it reminds us of our mortality.

Review Quotes

"Smart, intense, satisfying, and approachable." -- Newsweek

"The sustained quality of her accomplishment, poem by poem, is rare.... The voices... are authentic, their con- flicts and complexities universal." -- Georgia Review

"One of the most honored, decorated, and revered poets inVirginia history." -- Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Emerson's poems... are characteristic of the poet at her most human, by offering the subjective as human, its freakiness intact, and by making us believe that this offer- ing is the most poetic of documentary rituals." -- Cortland Review

" Smart, intense, satisfying, and approachable. Newsweek

The sustained quality of her accomplishment, poem by poem, is rare. . . . The voices . . . are authentic, their con- flicts and complexities universal. Georgia Review

One of the most honored, decorated, and revered poets in Virginia history. Richmond Times-Dispatch

Emerson s poems . . . are characteristic of the poet at her most human, by offering the subjective as human, its freakiness intact, and by making us believe that this offer- ing is the most poetic of documentary rituals. Cortland Review"

About the Author

Claudia Emerson published six poetry collections with LSU Press, including Late Wife, Secure the Shadow, and The Opposite House. A professor of English and member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Emerson served as the poet laureate of Virginia and won numerous awards for teaching and writing -- including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry -- before her death in 2014.