Figure Studies
Poems
Claudia Emerson
- 80 páginas
- English
- ePUB (apto para móviles)
- Disponible en iOS y Android
Figure Studies
Poems
Claudia Emerson
Información del libro
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.
The Mannequin above Main Street Motors
When the only ladies' dress shop closed, she was left on the street for trash, unsalvageable,
one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee
and blonde wig, so they helped themselves to her on a lark -- drunken impulse -- and for years kept her
leaning in a corner, beside an attic window, rendered invisible. The dusk
was also perpetual in the garage below, punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close
over the engines. An oily grime coated the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted
stock-car drivers, women in dated swimsuits, even their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted
there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel conceding to that place a greater, echoing
sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained, back turned forever to the dark storage
behind her, gaze leveled just above anyone's who could have looked up
to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing -- her expression still reluctant figure for it.
Preguntas frecuentes
I
ALL GIRLS SCHOOL
The Physical Plant
and everything costs in this seclusion
all of a kind in an archaic, combed
benches in rigid rows before crimson
the muted ticking of practice rooms, horses’ stalls
And in the brushes, their hair—enough to line
Headmaster
clears his throat to lead the assembly
brothers’, those distant as only kin can be. The girls
enough to notice in his loafers the clean,
Housemother
that would pass; she had private joys then,
now, moving sharklike through the halls’ courses,
girls’ hands swimming—pale fish—into and out of tense
Anatomical Model
shells, bees’ nests, and the skeletons of birds,
but not inaccurate—headless, armless,
lifts off, easy as the lid from a pot, the heart
reaching in for this conclusion.
The Girls Dissect the Eye of a Cow
in the aqueous chamber, center of the blind
from its orbit, from the body’s confinement,
and sun, from long nights spent wading in ruminant
with this thing intent on them, whether
Latin Teacher
buttoned all the way to the top, she greets
rebellious, identical. They want Italian,
but this woman fluent in a language
slow as the minute hand on the grinding clock
in a bun substantial as a hornets’ nest—ashen gray.
translations all the more hated for being inherited.
of the dining room, where she directs them
She serves fried chicken by inq...
Índice
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- The Mannequin above Main Street Motors
- I ALL GIRLS SCHOOL
- II GOSSIPS
- III EARLY LESSONS
- IV