The Opposite House - (Southern Messenger Poets) by Claudia Emerson

Book Synopsis

With graceful lines swooping like a bird in flight, Claudia Emerson's newest collection explores the harsh realities of aging and the limitations of the human body, as well as the loneliness, fear, and anger that can accompany us as we live.

Keenly observed and beautifully executed, these poems move from the grim façade that hides beauty-prosthetic eyes- to the beautiful scene that conceals violence-a rural retreat. Emerson also considers once common things that are fast becoming obsolete: cursive writing, telephone booths, barbers.

At once hopeful and cognizant of all the reasons why humans might despair, these poems echo with remarkable insight into the true nature of life.

Review Quotes

"In her deft, unflinching, and fiercely gorgeous new collection, The Opposite House, Claudia Emerson exposes what language will salvage and what remains unsalvageable. Where 'the fact/ of every door/remains/ reference to/an antecedent made/vague-' we find clarity: in a space both familiar and alternate, like that of the elegized 'Telephone Booth, ' 'robbed of confession, apology, despair.' Whether in spider eggs blasted into space 'to see if they would hatch, ' or in an embalmer's passion for his work, 'art-far beyond balm-levitation, almost/that immaculate a suspense, exact/ and abstract, the thing itself made other, / italicized, ' one finds throughout, the threat of oblivion set hard against our longing. Emerson, like 'The Ocularist, ' becomes 'architect/not of form/but of function, /not of object/but of the seen-/self, enticing it not/to look away."-Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, author of Open Interval

"The poems in this dark, wholly absorbing book hover around absence, the absence left by death, by grief, by the fading of childhood memory, by the decline of a small community, and by the larger, inevitable sweep of time. The book begins in specific time and place and spirals out to vaster attitudes and claims, to reference Dickinson, a presiding spirit in this book. And yet, the absence conjured here is never emptiness: it is a thing itself, a firm reality that happens to defy words-almost. I have read and re-read this haunting book and will continue to do so. It mesmerizes and enchants, and convinces the reader that one is in the presence of a master and a deeply human poet."-Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man

About the Author

CLAUDIA EMERSON has published five poetry collections with LSU Press, including Late Wife, Figure Studies, and Secure the Shadow. A professor of English and member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Emerson has served as the poet laureate of Virginia and won numerous awards for teaching and writing, including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.