Impossible Bottle: Poems

This posthumous volume of poetry from Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson explores the suspended state of existence that illness imposes upon its sufferers -- what she calls the impossible bottle. With a strong will and a self-deprecating awareness of the instinct to seek meaning in metaphor, she confronts the indignities, fears, and moments of grace in a struggle with cancer. Her poems forge unlikely connections between the present reality and memories of the past, such as an MRI scan conjuring up images of a June expedition through a tunnel under a Maryland mountain.
Rooted equally in the sterility of the hospital and the vitality of the natural world, Impossible Bottle mines the trappings of illness, showing how disease attempts to rob us of our humanity even as it reminds us of our mortality.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 09/09/2015
ISBN: 9780807160831
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.33lbs
Size: 9.05h x 6.05w x 0.24d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 08/17/2015
Library Journal 08/01/2015 pg. 101