“Such an astonishingly brilliant, complex, and uniquely beautiful book. Its confident, self-complicating long poems drive headlong toward an ever-more-nuanced and layered understanding of the inescapable traps of womanhood and motherhood. There’s so much pleasure and surprise in how these poems shift register and scope from line to line, section to section, as Bludworth de Barrios keeps moving us incrementally and masterfully toward striking flashes of insight. This is one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a very long time.”

“In this stunning collection, Emily Bludworth de Barrios gives us a nuanced gaze at the domestic, the affluent, the maternal. It is a complex, psychical dissection of the role of the so-called rich wife and the expectations put upon women by themselves and others. I come away questioning the names we assign ourselves: ‘The rich wife is not really    a rich wife / If richness is something you carry in your mind.’ Here we see the body as ‘a new ancient vessel,’ and ‘the woman pinned like a specimen.’ The speaker is merciless and honest, never fixed in meaning. There’s a fierce defiance and acceptance of the ‘bourgeois egos eating up the earth.’ I see this book as an incredible revisiting of our domestic mythologies, offering not answers but solidarity and curiosity at the ‘messy business of life.’”

“A flair for kitsch is only one of the tools in this poet’s arsenal. A wicked sense of humor is another. A third is a talent for astute literary and mythological analysis.”

“Her narratives are less built as accumulations than as a cadence of narrative waves, rolling through rise and fall to either a final crescent, or a sweep up to the shore of the space beyond that final word. . . . There is a swell and swoop of her narrative, but also a subtle music across that same lyric that itself fills and diminishes across such a lovely spectrum of her lines. One is nearly required to close one’s eyes to truly listen.”