Impossible Bottle: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets) - Softcover

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.

''Emerson never tried to overwhelm the reader with a lot of curtain chewing and scene stealing. She was a solitary, an off-in-the-corner type, a classic observer as observant as a sniper. . . . In her last months, Emerson added much to an art that was delicate but indomitable.''--The New Criterion

''A poet capable of revealing startling discoveries inside quiet, quotidian circumstances. . . . The marvel of Claudia Emerson's Impossible Bottle is that the highly charged, collaborative perspectives of sitter and artist in this final encounter are made available to the reader simultaneously, indivisibly, as one.''--Virginia Quarterly Review

''[Emerson's] final collection, Impossible Bottle, is one of primal power and beauty, a distillation of nothing less than a life into page after page of music impossibly clear, which is not to say, easy. The poems here gaze unflinchingly at a world of incomprehensible pain in the face of inevitable loss. The true wonder of this collection, then, is what a joy it is to read, how easily the music builds and flows from one line to the next. If the poet's task, as some have said, is to transmute the thing, the world, into something other and more beautiful, then Claudia Emerson was a poet of unmatched excellence. The really extraordinary part is that she does not simply metaphorize or sleight-of-hand what is into something we would rather behold. She shows us what is, and tell us gently, This too is beautiful.'' --Fogged Clarity