Secure the Shadow: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)
''With superb artistry and a cool, but never cold, eye, Emerson sublimates her grief into elegant elegy, unsentimental and unforgettable--as when, driving past a house fire's 'bright-rising / enravishment,' she does 'not stop to watch someone else's / tragedy burn past this brief, nearly / beautiful suspension that changes nothing.''' --Andrew Hudgins''I really do not know of another writer of her generation who can weave such diverse materials together to make such a cohesive and urgent whole. WithSecure the Shadow,Emerson once again proves that she is among our essential poets.'' --David Wojahn''From the ghostly likenesses of children in postmortem photographs, the architectural remains of small-town businesses gone under--remnants of the interstate's swift abandon--to the hidden vein of uranium beneath a plot of local farmland, these poems reckon with losses both personal and communal. This is a hauntingly beautiful collection from a poet attentive to measure and the ways of things in both the natural and man-made worlds to reveal to us 'musings of a lucid soul / or the disclosures of God.''' --Natasha Trethewey''I really do not know of another writer of her generation who can weave such diverse materials together to make such a cohesive and urgent whole. WithSecure the Shadow,Emerson once again proves that she is among our essential poets.'' --David Wojahn''From the ghostly likenesses of children in postmortem photographs, the architectural remains of small-town businesses gone under--remnants of the interstate's swift abandon--to the hidden vein of uranium beneath a plot of local farmland, these poems reckon with losses both personal and communal. This is a hauntingly beautiful collection from a poet attentive to measure and the ways of things in both the natural and man-made worlds to reveal to us 'musings of a lucid soul / or the disclosures of God.''' --Natasha Trethewey