Rich Wife is a collection of expansive long poems whose structures echo the cluttered charm of a dresser adorned with hats and hairpins, vials and scarves. Drawing inspiration from James Schuyler’s looping conversations and Chelsey Minnis’s cascading forms, these poems traverse the interlaced landscapes of motherhood, marriage, wealth, and the unspoken contracts of domestic life. 

Emily Bludworth de Barrios folds personal experience into far-ranging meditations on beauty, nostalgia, power, and privilege, following in the footsteps of Gertude Stein’s fluid turns in Lifting Belly and Anne Carson’s woven observations in The Glass Essay. The poems coil back on themselves, creating recursive strands that offer readers both intimacy and critical distance. As much a contemplation of art as it is of womanhood, Rich Wife engages deeply with art history and aesthetics and examines the domestic as an artistic canvas in itself, where every object and relationship becomes a charged symbol. 
 

“I am going to make a poem,” writes Emily Bludworth de Barrios, “As if / I could put beautiful things in a box to keep them there.” With Shopping, or The End of Time she has done that and so much more. These kaleidoscopic images reflect and reverberate across time and space, revealing collisions of identity, motherhood, childhood, houses, shopping malls, industrial canals—the hopes and fears of what we’ve lost and gained over the decades in our mad rush for connection, for ownership, for goods.

A detective’s red thread spiderweb mapping the constellations among parenting, capitalism, aging, and ghosts, this stunning collection is wistful, unmoored, glamorous, and immense. These tour-de-force poems simultaneously capture an impression of emptiness and pleasure, of existing in a liminal space filled with both hollowness and potential.