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Rich Wife
Emily Bludworth de Barrios
Wisconsin Poetry Series
Sean Bishop and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Series Editors
Ronald Wallace, Founding Series Editor
“Such an astonishingly brilliant, complex, and uniquely beautiful book. Its confident, self-complicating long poems drive headlong toward an ever-more-nuanced and layered understanding of the inescapable traps of womanhood and motherhood. There’s so much pleasure and surprise in how these poems shift register and scope from line to line, section to section, as Bludworth de Barrios keeps moving us incrementally and masterfully toward striking flashes of insight. This is one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a very long time.”
—Wayne Miller
Winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry
Rich Wife is a collection of expansive long poems whose structures echo the cluttered charm of a dresser adorned with hats and hairpins, vials and scarves. Drawing inspiration from James Schuyler’s looping conversations and Chelsey Minnis’s cascading forms, these poems traverse the interlaced landscapes of motherhood, marriage, wealth, and the unspoken contracts of domestic life.
Emily Bludworth de Barrios folds personal experience into far-ranging meditations on beauty, nostalgia, power, and privilege, following in the footsteps of Gertude Stein’s fluid turns in Lifting Belly and Anne Carson’s woven observations in The Glass Essay. The poems coil back on themselves, creating recursive strands that offer readers both intimacy and critical distance. As much a contemplation of art as it is of womanhood, Rich Wife engages deeply with art history and aesthetics and examines the domestic as an artistic canvas in itself, where every object and relationship becomes a charged symbol.
“On one end of sleep a child was crying
On the other end of sleep a child was crying
The rich wife stretches a nest between these two points of time
The children of the rich wife peel back the rim of her brain
To feed on what she grew there herself”
—Excerpt from “Rich Wife”
Emily Bludworth de Barrios’s previous books include Shopping, or The End of Time, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Harvard Review, Copper Nickel, The Poetry Review, and Oxford Poetry. She was raised in Houston, Cairo, and Caracas, and now lives in both Houston, Texas and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.
Author's Website - https://www.emilybludworthdebarrios.com/
Praise
“In this stunning collection, Emily Bludworth de Barrios gives us a nuanced gaze at the domestic, the affluent, the maternal. It is a complex, psychical dissection of the role of the so-called rich wife and the expectations put upon women by themselves and others. I come away questioning the names we assign ourselves: ‘The rich wife is not really a rich wife / If richness is something you carry in your mind.’ Here we see the body as ‘a new ancient vessel,’ and ‘the woman pinned like a specimen.’ The speaker is merciless and honest, never fixed in meaning. There’s a fierce defiance and acceptance of the ‘bourgeois egos eating up the earth.’ I see this book as an incredible revisiting of our domestic mythologies, offering not answers but solidarity and curiosity at the ‘messy business of life.’”
—Bianca Stone
Table of Contents
Grandmother Worship
Collecting Sticks
Rich Wife
The Pelvic Bone
Hera
Acknowledgments
References
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Larger images
April 2025
LC: 2024039577 PS
112 pp. 5.5 x 8.5
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