Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Rich Wife

 

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At night on a beach nearby

A woman was walking

All around her the inhalation and the exhalation of the surf

The ocean heaving in a continuous soothing respiration

In this version of the story

I have altered the shape of society

At night on a beach nearby

A woman was walking

All around her the inhalation and the exhalation of the surf

The ocean heaving in a continuous soothing respiration

In this version of the story

A woman is walking at night on a beach nearby

And nothing happens to her

She’s fine (“Rich Wife”)

The third full-length collection by Emily Bludworth de Barrios, a poet simultaneously based in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia and Houston, Texas, is Rich Wife (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), following Splendor (H_NGM_N Books, 2015) and Shopping, or The End of Time (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. The book is self-described as “a collection of long poems whose structure 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.” Set as a quintet of five extended poem-sections—“Grandmother Worship,” “Collecting Sticks,” “Rich Wife,” “The Pelvic Bone” and “Hera”—the poems in Bludworth de Barrios’ latest offer a slow unfold and unfurl, as her narrative lyrics accumulate, surrounding and encompassing her subject matter through direct sentences held by the heart. “Of course,” she writes, as part of the title poem-sequence, “The rich wife writes a book everyone will hate // Everyone will hate // Hatred seethes in oozing glossy pools // Sweep your hatred into little piles // And what will you do with your hatred?”

There is something interesting in the elasticity of these extended poem-sections, offering a stretch and fragment, a back-and-forth of pulled-apart lines and small moments, all set across an extensive and accumulated canvas. “Of the woman I know,” she writes, further on, “something bad has happened to each // It isn’t my place to say what [.]” I find the physical scope of her poems, and her canvas, quite fascinating, structured down to the detail of the line, of the phrase. “I was born into a time when women were almost liberated,” she writes, “I was born into a time // We put chemicals on our hair to make it curl // Chemicals on our hair to make it straight // With metal clamps or tongs we made it crimp, or roll, or flat // Imagine a doll that has a person inside it // Imagine a human who wakes curled in the head of a doll / I open her eyelids like this // Like this I move her arm [.]” Through sentences that pull apart and re-stitch, Bludworth de Barrios writes of the rich wife, writes of women, writes of domestic help and domestic power; of excess, possibility and cultural, social and societal worth; of domestic power with a powerlessness and vise versa; with all the latent and blatant contradictions and presumptions and collisions brought to bear.

She lives in a neighborhood with a gate

In her front living room she is closing the curtains now

Or a woman who works for her is closing the curtains now

She herself remains missing from view