The World’s Wife

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Be terrified. It’s you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you’ll go, betray me, strayfrom home.So better by far for me if you were stone.–from “Medusa”
Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil’s Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfris of famous — and infamous — male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.

Carol Ann Duffy has published four highly praised collections of poetry. Her last, Mean Time, won the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. She lives in Manchester, England.

“[Duffy] offers us the past as it could have been. . . . [Her] project recalls the poems of the Americans Ai and Pamela White Hadas, but the élan of this volume sets it apart, the characters (and poems) triumphant.” —The New Yorker“Duffy is one of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry–any poetry–for years.” —Eavan Boland, The Independent on Sunday (London)“These thirty poems vibrate with intense colloquialisms, physicality, energy, freshness, and cheek. . . . They leap off the page even in a silent reading. . . . The best are inventive, subversive, and written with great rhythmical and rhyming dash.” —Anthony Thwaite, The Sunday Telegraph (London)

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