Impossible Bottle: Poems

by Claudia Emerson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807160855
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	09/09/2015
Series:	Southern Messenger Poets
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	2 MB

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.

What People are Saying About This

R. T. Smith

"The poems of Impossible Bottle reveal that Claudia Emerson felt the shadow of mortality upon her but refused to flinch and devoted herself to shining a light through that shadow. In her observations and meditations, Emerson found a new radiance as she beheld a wide range of subjects, many relating to questions of dying, 'the familiar art of sorrow,' all pulsing with her love of life and words. This new volume gives us some of the most deft, intimate, passionately understated and generous poems in the language. The range of her compassion is astonishing, the precision of her verse heartbreaking, as she navigates the undiscovered country. These brave and brilliant poems will long inspire us as "the body of light that hangs from the rafters," for Emerson is a poet of the truest measure." -- R. T. Smith, author of In the Night Orchard

short version, if needed:

"Impossible Bottle gives us some of the most deft, intimate, passionately understated and generous poems in the language. The range of Claudia Emerson's compassion is astonishing, the precision of her verse heartbreaking, as she navigates the undiscovered country. These brave and brilliant poems will long inspire readers as 'the body of light that hangs from the rafters,' for Emerson is a poet of the truest measure." -- R. T. Smith, author of In the Night Orchard

Alice Friman

"Delicately subtle, but always steel-eyed and honest, the poems in Claudia Emerson's posthumous collection, Impossible Bottle, serve as witness to the cliff's edge where she must have been living to write them. The edge where opposites bleed into each other, where 'sorrow is ecstatic' and where the dying might feel 'a lightening, the way a snake must / on slipping through its discarded // mouth into another year, or, knowing nothing / of a year, into time itself.' These are translucent poems, transcendent and shattering." -- Alice Friman, author of The View from Saturn

Editorial Reviews

08/17/2015
Despite her untimely death from cancer in 2014, Pulitzer–Prize winner Emerson (The Opposite House) offers readers another opportunity to revel in her striking poetry. Here, she primarily meditates upon illness and its effects as well as about the experience of being a patient. Writing almost entirely in truncated couplets, Emerson complements scientific language with deep introspection: “your sorrow is ecstatic something/ you do not feel// you hear your own voice at a distance.” She describes the brain as a “bewildered margin,” and her fellow patients as “folks on the same bus,/ its slowness a shared slow-jolt alarm, the lumbering/ maddening, then numbing.” Readers will be soothed by her poems’ therapeutic power, their ability to transport them to her world: “Imagining narratives// worse than my own has become a kind of balm—/ but all of them are kept// secreted.” Emerson is always forthcoming about herself and her situation, sharing deeply personal material in the most respectful and illuminating fashion. “This time, you are the anatomy/ lesson, your surgery// a sharper degree of difficulty,” she writes. As the collection comes to a close, Emerson describes an earthquake as if it were her life, knowing it “for what it is only when it stops, with shocked/ clarity, the way// nothing alive ever has.” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

From the Publisher

08/01/2015
Following last spring's The Opposite House, this posthumous volume from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Emerson summons up her final battle with cancer while unearthing and distilling memories that give final shape to her life. In the first section, "anatomies," narrative poems delivered in the poet's signature honed, forthright style show her having an MRI ("She feeds me into the mouth/ of the thing") while recalling an uncle's well, the Mexican wedding dress sent by a friend, and a freak storm "you knew would spare us." These poems alternate with more telescoped "Metastasis" poems, whose compressed lines and fractured form capture edgier emotions ("there you are in seeing/ first its habit// received form"). The numbered poems of "infusion suite" take us deeper into the poet's reflections during treatment; "the surgery was a flash fire/ in the yard," she says; and elsewhere, "I am not this, not here, this time." The section "participant observations" turns outward to offer a series of intently rendered portraits, while "impossible bottle"—the title recalling ships enclosed in glass—limns moments with or about the poet's mother, all the world's mysteries now sealed and set. VERDICT A rare, quiet look at life's end, moving and brave; for most collections.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal