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.

“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“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

• Grandmother WorshipCollecting SticksRich WifeThe Pelvic BoneHeraAcknowledgmentsReferences