Rich Wife

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.

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.