Emily Bludworth de Barrios’s books include Rich Wife (University of Wisconsin 2025), recipient of the Four Lakes Prize, and Shopping or The End of Time (University of Wisconsin 2022), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Her poems have recently appeared in publications such as Harvard Review, Copper Nickel, The Poetry Review, and Oxford Poetry. She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and also holds degrees from Goldsmiths College and The College of William & Mary. She was raised in Houston, Cairo, and Caracas, and now lives in Houston, Texas and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.
Rich Wife contains five poems, mostly long poems, that contemplate — through marvelous slippages of sound — domesticity, wealth, disparity, beauty, and the conditions necessary for making art. In this book, Bludworth de Barrios contrasts how men depict women in Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Pre-Raphaelite art with how women present themselves, through clothing, homes, makeup, modeling, court cases, novels, poems, and portraits — including Amy Lowell, Edith Wharton, Fanny Eaton, Elizabeth Siddal, Kate Chopin, Zinaida Serebriakova, and Mary Delany, whose “layers of paper flowers burst from the dark.”
Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem, “Grandmother Worship,” introduce the readers to the poems that are to follow? To me it introduces me to the word play and associative logic where the speaker (as a mother, daughter and granddaughter) looks at and through the objectification of the female body through objects (lipstick, dresses, food prep).
Emily Bludworth de Barrios: Your observation reminds me of Mary Wollstonecraft writing, in 1792, “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” When I was in high school, I was friends with boys who were in bands they had started — no one had given them permission. They taught themselves to play music, they formed groups, they gave themselves names, organized shows, publicized them, made flyers, recorded albums, went on DIY tours. Girls decorated the sidelines, hoping for a glimpse of attention and validation. I don’t know if this sounds old-fashioned or irrelevant now, but when I was a teenager, in Texas and in Venezuela, the most important thing a girl could be was to be beautiful. Not talented or intelligent, not funny or creative, not determined or athletic. Our creativity was shaped around glossy magazines, not around making art or planning for a career of whatever kind. At least that was my perception of it.
Some of the book touches on this, the narrow lane of possibilities a woman might find herself moving in, self-imposed, externally imposed, self-policed, externally reinforced. The book traces and criticizes these narrowed pathways of imagination while it also celebrates the rituals and mysteries of womanhood — the pleasure of good clothes, of children, of beauty, of romance.
That which gives pain also gives pleasure. The sharp, bittersweet tang of romance, the ephemeral nature of youth. Clothes as a manifestation of personality, another kind of validation, primping as ceremony, the bathroom countertop cluttered with vials and baubles, the lush private ritual of painting your fingernails and lips, coiling your hair, treatments, masks, serums. Each polish and eyeshadow and lipstick with its own name, like little poems or books, evoking other moments or lives. Beauty evaporating away, as Robert Herrick warns, “We die / As your hours do, and dry / Away.” The circle of life, a cliche, but persistent because true. The daughter becomes the mother who becomes the grandmother who has seen the daughter become mother.
When I lived in London I used to travel often between Richmond and New Cross, and I’d find myself staring at the opposite underground platforms throughout my journey, seeing boxlike, contained, other worlds, which seemed remote and mysteriously different, and I idly wondered what those spaces would be like to be inside — until one day I realized I was in fact in each opposite platform on my journey, depending on whether I were coming or going. Position and vantage point rotating, daughter, granddaughter, mother, grandmother.
And of course women are artists, and have been artists, even as “the mind shapes itself to the body.” “Grandmother Worship” opens with and is accompanied by Patsy Cline’s voice, as my childhood was accompanied by her voice, with its creamy, mournful quality, carrying across the arrangements, longing, effervescent, permanent, creating a feeling like women confiding in one another over coffee, between moments of washing laundry, on a neighbor’s screened-in porch. The art and lives of women artists are considered throughout the book, how they’ve been formed, or informed, or deformed by their experiences as women; or how they haven’t been.
You also mention how the opening poem establishes the associative logic and word play of the poems — I think of it as water tripping down stairs, continuously spilling forward. Or maybe water continuously sliding from the slats of a mill — but the mill itself looping back again perpetually, generations and experiences looping back around, a voice moving, circling, ruminating in one place.
TT: This is your third poetry collection. Can you describe the process of putting together the collection? How does being in transit (between Richmond and New Cross, between daughter and mother, migrating or emigrating between Texas and Venezuela) help shape your writing process?
EBB: I began four of the five poems with their titles. Before writing anything, I texted my friend, “My new book is going to be called RICH WIFE and half of it is going to be a 30-page poem called RICH WIFE and half of it is going to be a 30-page poem called HERA.” In the end, I wrote five poems.
The first poem I wrote was the title poem, “Rich Wife.” A poet I like had asked for advice on Twitter about an item of clothing to buy, and I made a suggestion which I pretty much immediately realized was inappropriately expensive because it was many times the cost of what others were suggesting, and I felt ashamed. This started me on the path to think about art-making, class, money (where they overlap and where they don’t), and the conditions (the luxury of time or training or confidence) necessary to create art. Like trying to separate a mass of delicate gold chains that have become tangled in a jewelry box, through writing I was able to pull apart some of these ideas and lay them side by side. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the poem is the record of untangling the chains.
To speak to what you asked about, about being in transit, I moved several times when I was growing up because my dad worked for an international oil company — that’s what the three places I lived in, Egypt, Texas, and Venezuela, have in common. In the particular town where I grew up in Texas, economic disparity was kind of secret and hidden; I think some people there can live their whole lives inside well-paved neighborhoods of brick houses and swimming pools, planning vacations to France, travelling from comfortable bubble to bubble, having only the haziest notions of financial precarity. This was the backdrop of my childhood until I moved to Caracas, where economic disparity was heightened — wealth and poverty both more present and acute.
I was visually confronted by it because of the topography of the city: I could see the mountains covered with makeshift neighborhoods of cinder block houses and a silver hotel gleamed, abandoned, on a mountaintop, the cable car that once brought tourists there long broken, a symbol of past prosperity. I saw that plenty of people weren’t able to meet their basic needs, and that even in that era of wealth, the maintenance of high-rises and public infrastructure had begun to wane, sidewalks broken into chunks by buttress tree roots, cracked terrazzo in olive-green lobbies. The odor of diesel on the street and leaded gasoline exhaust coating buildings. In contrast to this broader poverty and burgeoning disrepair, my classmates and friends were from very, very wealthy families — I remember a wood-paneled, two-story library with a mezzanine, parrots in a garden in an enormous enclosure, butlers serving quails’ eggs from silver platters. But their family customs and sense of self was shaped by money in a way that was even more foreign to me than elaborate libraries or private planes. In “Rich Wife,” I wanted to consider these disparities and luxuries, the role of money in art, and the role of money in women’s lives more broadly.
(Tiffany, that question was so pertinent to the experience of my life I had a tough time addressing it with brevity; I wrote and erased many responses answering the question in different ways and settled on the above — one among many possible answers!)
The second poem I wrote, “Hera,” was meant to answer the question: “Why did I name my daughter after a vengeful goddess?” And then: Why is the goddess of women, childbirth, and marriage simultaneously the goddess who’s depicted as being jealous, enraged, and perpetually cheated-on? Hera and Zeus, like the perennial sitcom trope of harping wife and put-upon husband. And how to live outside cultural scripts that have existed, seemingly, forever — in which your assigned role is to endure these particular indignities or hardships, to be a source of hardship?
I wrote “The Pelvic Bone” after buying the Venezuelan poet Yolanda Pantin’s book El hueso pélvico. At that time, I hadn’t read her book — I have now, it’s a long poem about Caracas that revolves around the image of a statue of a female folk hero sitting astride a horse, holding a pelvic bone uplifted in her outstretched arms — but I was curious as to what a poem called “The Pelvic Bone” could possibly be. So I wrote my version of it before reading her poem. The phrase conjured an image of the pelvic bone as the world’s gate, and pelvic bones, laid end-to-end, forming the tunnel of history that time runs through. The intimacy and indignity of pregnancy and childbirth, the precious burden and sweet miracle of babies, who are instantly beginning their own path, a new world sprouting into existence, being once the baby who was held, then being the mother holding the baby, time turning on its wheel.
I wrote “Grandmother Worship” starting with the title, too — with reverence for my grandmothers who ultimately led difficult lives, in contrast to their beaming, upturned, hopeful faces in photos from the day they were married — not wedding photos, because they didn’t have weddings, only a freshly-pressed dress and lipstick, the townhall, and afterwards off to a bar to celebrate with friends, new husbands fresh from the war and the bright possibilities of what the future would hold.
“Collecting Sticks” is a poem I’d also written during this time, but since it’s a short poem I wasn’t thinking of it as belonging to this group. Then one day I looked at it and realized this little poem — about mothers dissolving into history — does in fact belong with these other poems. Women given their fathers’ surname and then their husbands’ surname. The memory of the matrilineal line passes away in a few generations, but the patrilineal line continues back many generations, retained in the name, one man linking to another, back through time. Thinking of old portraits in which a woman is identified by her husband, something like “Mrs. John Smith” — so it becomes quite difficult to even discover her own name. I was thinking of my grandmothers and my great-grandmothers, making biscuits every morning and holding their babies on their hips and then disappearing without a trace, like a bird’s nest disintegrating after its season has passed.
The book only has five poems in it, so, as you can imagine, arranging them was simple — unlike a book with 40 or 50 poems in it.
TT: Do you consider the five poems in Rich Wife long poems?
EBB: Yes — long poems in the lyric tradition, as opposed to the epic or narrative or allegorical. What I love about the long lyric is its flexibility, how it can contain so many modes and methods, incorporating from other genres and art forms: analytical, ecstatic, essayistic, cubist, sound-driven, employing montage and collage. Each poet writing a long lyric invents a unique structure to contain it; as a reader myself, discovering a long lyric poem’s structure and interior logic, its interests and landscape, is another pleasure of the tradition. Jubilate Agno, Song of Myself, Lifting Belly, The Glass Essay, and Poemland, for example, showcase the variety and range of the long lyric poem.
I think the most important quality a long poem can have is that the reader wants to continue reading it!
TT: And to follow up on that previous question, who are your influences when you think about the form of the poem, in its length, content, concerns, associative logic?
EBB: I read Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1915 poems “A Cloud in Trousers” and “The Backbone Flute” when I was in college, for a class called MASS MEDIA AND COMMUNISM, taught by a woman who grew up in the USSR and gave us old stale Soviet cigarettes to try. Mayakovsky’s long slender monologues burst into frenzied yelling, pulling together obsessive longing with tragedies from the news, flirtation, and a godlike, eternal voice. His poems were unlike anything I’d read, and I loved them — their wobbliness, the long shape, how his voice pierced through the membrane of time: “It seems / I shall plunge head first from the scaffolding of days.”
I also loved the 1971 Herbert Mason translation of Gilgamesh, which I first read as a freshman in high school and later again in my 20s — as he says in his introduction, he had lost a dear friend as he was working on the translation, and his emotions and feelings of helplessness infused the translation. I remember, without looking it up (my copy of the book is in Bolivia), the barmaid soothing Gilgamesh in his doomed-to-fail journey to bring his friend back to life: “You are a thing that carries so much tiredness.”
Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, written between 1759 and 1763, which I read for the first time in college, was another important long poem for me: the sweetness and humor (of his cat: “for he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command”), its proud strangeness, and its variety. He invented patterns, worked within them, and disrupted them.
Gertrude Stein’s 1927 Lifting Belly is another long lyric poem I internalized and loved — the rolling cascade of the refrain gaining momentum, language as sensation and texture. A love poem felt more than reasoned.
The “Prefaces” to Chelsey Minnis’s 2007 book Bad Bad form a serial poem, reaching back in time to Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” I wish I could write more like her: funny, defiant, sure of her own taste, and (to my millennial sensibility always looking up to Gen X) cool. Detached and using similes that feel like cutting someone’s clothes away to perform emergency surgery (extreme, untoward, required).
Audre Lorde’s 1978 book The Black Unicorn contains two poems that influenced the form of this book, both using timeless poetic techniques. The first, “Hanging Fire,” is about a girl passing through her difficult teen years while her mother is, for unnamed reasons, withdrawn and unable to provide the support the girl of the poem needs. Amid the girl’s litany of adolescent complaints, Lorde repeats a refrain three times: “and momma’s in the bedroom / with the door closed.” The adolescent complaints vibrate against the absence of the mother, the fact repeated and not remarked upon. (I too like to use refrains, as I did in “Rich Wife,” “The Pelvic Bone,” and “Hera”; I like that a repeated phrase gathers weight with each repetition.) The second poem that really took ahold of me from The Black Unicorn was the poem “Sahara.” The poem begins as an observation of the Sahara Desert as seen from flying above it, then evolves into an incandescent reverie of epistrophe, in which “kinds of sand” are included in an energetic litany, where “sand” becomes a stand-in for desire, misogyny, queer love, beauty, and defiance. Both of these poems embody the hypnotic qualities of repetition, its meaningfulness and persuasiveness, its occasionally psychedelic meaningful-meaninglessness. And Lorde, in “Sahara,” also uses associative logic, the mind leaping to make connections that exist but aren’t explicit, invisible threads holding the lines together.
James Schuyler’s 1974 book Hymn to Life was also incredibly important to me as I was writing this book. There are many ways a long poem can be sustained, structurally — ideally, a long poem should feel like a treat, not a punishment — and in his poem “Hymn to Life,” Schuyler creates a structure in which he’s observing life unfolding in springtime; simultaneously, within this structure, he’s delving into observations and memories, dipping into little pockets of humor or lament. This is a question about long poems that interests me: how to maintain variety, unity, interest, depth, and coherence as the poem continues on.
I wish I could write more like all of these poets I admire — and many are necessarily left out — but I can only write like myself. Once, years ago, I heard Christopher Walken being interviewed on TV, about his acting method, and he said, “I imitate other actors. I’m a lousy imitator, but I do my version of somebody.” Passing through the filter of himself, his acting comes out, no matter what is in his head, like himself. I’ve always been charmed by this conceptualization of influence and making art.
TT: It’s amazing how you draw from these diffuse sources to build towards keeping and sustaining the reader’s attention, through languor, strangeness, language as sensation or texture, its repetition spiraling, and in thinking about womanhood in the restraints of a woman’s absence, etc.
For aspiring poets seeking to find their voice, what is your recommendation?
EBB: Years ago I wrote a poetry newsletter, curating a themed selection each week, bound together by an introduction that I would write. Reading widely — books I really loved, books I was challenged by, obscure books, books in translation — and writing about other people’s writing in a public-facing way sharpened my understanding of my tastes and values.
Memorizing or translating poems heightens my perception of whatever poem I’ve memorized or translated; it’s as close to momentarily standing inside another poet’s consciousness as I can think of.
Twice I’ve written books and then thrown them out. When a book isn’t coalescing — because the writing isn’t what I want it to be — throwing it out allows me to move on instead of trying to improve something that isn’t right to begin with.
I’m interested in all kinds of artists, how they think and what they do — ceramicists, chefs, translators, tailors, architects, musicians, graphic designers. Their relationship to taste, audience, customer, communication, specialized knowledge, money, materials, history. For example, I like Matisse writing about his development as an artist, his rocky relationship with his teachers and his influences from earlier eras.
This is a small thing, but for whatever reason it took me a long time to imagine it: I keep a small shelf of books that I most love so that they’re always nearby — separated from the rest of the books, where they would blend in and disappear from my consciousness.
TT: What are you working on now that we can look forward to?
EBB: I was born in another century, and that’s how it feels. The contours of society and the behaviors between people have changed so much as technology and the structure of the economy have changed. What felt eternal or important has disappeared or faded away — the vibrating hum of rewinding a VHS tape, lightning bugs that no longer hover around in suburban streets at dusk in the summertime, the errand of dropping off film to get developed at the pharmacy, having a stranger ask for your number, having memorized all the telephone numbers of your friends. The new book I’m working on is my way of thinking about technology and living within it. One of the poems, Infinity, can be read in Sixth Finch.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers?
EBB: Rich Wife references a lot of visual art; I made a gallery to accompany the book.