Impossible Bottle: Poems

Despite her untimely death from cancer in 2014, Pulitzer–Prize winner Emerson (The Opposite House) offers readers another opportunity to revel in her striking poetry. Here, she primarily meditates upon illness and its effects as well as about the experience of being a patient. Writing almost entirely in truncated couplets, Emerson complements scientific language with deep introspection: “your sorrow is ecstatic something/ you do not feel// you hear your own voice at a distance.” She describes the brain as a “bewildered margin,” and her fellow patients as “folks on the same bus,/ its slowness a shared slow-jolt alarm, the lumbering/ maddening, then numbing.” Readers will be soothed by her poems’ therapeutic power, their ability to transport them to her world: “Imagining narratives// worse than my own has become a kind of balm—/ but all of them are kept// secreted.” Emerson is always forthcoming about herself and her situation, sharing deeply personal material in the most respectful and illuminating fashion. “This time, you are the anatomy/ lesson, your surgery// a sharper degree of difficulty,” she writes. As the collection comes to a close, Emerson describes an earthquake as if it were her life, knowing it “for what it is only when it stops, with shocked/ clarity, the way// nothing alive ever has.” [em](Sept.) [/em]