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consciousness

Creation Myth

I’m without body but forming in the latticework 

of blood cell and fret. Each threat pulls me upward

tempting and building me until my spine lifts into a column,

Impossible Bottle. By Claudia Emerson. LSU, 2015. 65p. PB, $17.95.

Ecstatic Sorrow

Claudia Emerson, who died in December 2014, had come to be known as a poet capable of revealing startling discoveries inside quiet, quotidian circumstances. Her poems are set mostly in Southern rural and small-town scenes, moments in ordinary lives that would normally elude anyone else’s attention.