num_pages: 64
description: 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 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.
language: English
title: Late Wife
titlecomplete: Late Wife
genres: Ghosts, Adult, Female Authors, Family, Marriage, Poetry, Nonfiction, Womens
ratings_count: 1117
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Poetry
publisher: LSU Press