Claudia Emerson

Biography

Claudia Emerson (1957 - 2014) was the author of several books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife (2005), Secure the Shadow (2012), and The Opposite House (2015), all published by Louisiana State. Her honors included two additional Pulitzer Prize nominations, fellowships from the Library of Congress and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the poet laureateship of Virginia. 

See Work

POETRY

Poetry Poster #6: Claudia Emerson

By Claudia Emerson

This week’s poem is by Claudia Emerson: “Greengrocer.” It appeared in our Spring 2012 issue on the state of American Poetry. To download a high-resolution PDF of this image, click here.

POETRY / Spring 2012

House Sparrows

By Claudia Emerson

They are here, in the eaves, the clothesline pole,
hayloft—everywhere she looks—and everywhere
she goes they are there before her, in town

POETRY / Spring 2012

Greengrocer

By Claudia Emerson

Having made the maze of cartons, bins,
and scales, he moves, aproned, unseen among them,
the architectures his to build and rebuild

POETRY / Fall 2008

The Polio Vaccine, Chatham, Virginia, 1964

By Claudia Emerson

It was not death we came to fear but her life,
her other birth, waking remade from the womb

of that disease. One leg was withered, a dragging-

POETRY / Fall 2008

Spring Ice Storm

By Claudia Emerson

The forecast had not predicted it,
and its beginning, a calming, rumbled dusk

and pleasant lightning, she welcomed as harbinger

POETRY / Fall 2008

The Medical Venus

By Claudia Emerson

In the patient, quiet museum, she is exhibited
closed, indehiscent inside a glass casket,

reclining on her back, on hair long as her spine.

POETRY / Summer 2006

Anorexic, Farmers’ Market

By Claudia Emerson

All around her, we sounded melons, practiced
at hearing what we couldn’t see, pretending not
to notice when she stopped at the stall where the Amish

POETRY / Summer 2006

Piano Fire

By Claudia Emerson

How she must have dreaded us and our sweaty coins, more
than we hated practice, the lessons, scales, the winter-hot parlor,

her arthritic hands, the metronome’s awful tick. She lectured