Claude before Time and Space

Claudia Emerson’s carefully made, thoughtful, and unsparing last poems have a kind of wildness in them, a feeling of being released, a fatefulness that unspools in ways that are both surprising and inevitable. This book is her final and finest achievement. ~Edward Hirsch

Emerson never tried to overwhelm the reader with a lot of curtain chewing and scene stealing. She was a solitary, an off-in-the-corner type, a classic observer—as observant as a sniper. . . . In her last months, Emerson added much to an art that was delicate but indomitable. ~William Logan, New Criterion