Figure Studies: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)

Claudia Emerson (Author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807133612 ISBN 13: 9780807133613

Publisher: LSU Press, 2008

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 in which 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.

About the Author:

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.