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Rich Wife is a collection of long poems whose structures echo the cluttered charm of a dresser adorned with hats and hairpins, vials and scarves. Traversing 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. 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 all objects and relationships become charged symbols.

“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.