I first became interested when you said this book was only 5 poems, my writing group told me when I shared my review of Emily Bloodwurth de Barrios's second book, Rich Wife. The review had already been rejected at one journal, and my anxiety about not being able to place it in a timely manner was mounting. The author had given me a free book after I saw her post on instagram offering to send a book to anyone willing to write a review. I did not want to be a jerk.
     I discovered Rich Wife after reading an excerpt in Copper Nickel. I was captivated by the unapologetically long lines, the writer's intellect, and the combination of domestic/unpoetic scenes with facts about the lives of Mary Delaney, Kate Chopin and Nefertiti. I jumped at the chance to review it.
     My writing group says to cut the opening, everyone reads poetry to encounter another consciousness—you don't need to say that. What I'm trying to explain is how the book becomes a seething consciousness of women throughout time.
     The review takes a turn when you start investigating the question: who is the Rich Wife?
     In the poem "RichWife," Bludworth de Barrios calls her "the most despicable creature in the world." She is aware of the ways that the rich wife is viewed and derided, the performative ways in which the rich wife must behave, but the reader never knows if the speaker considers herself to be a rich wife, or if the rich wife is to be reviled or pitied. One of the most brilliant parts of the book is how the author turns the problem of the "rich wife" on its head by complicating the picture—the rich wife is a societal construct that becomes impossible to judge. Bloodwurth de Barrios writes directly: "We made monsters of ourselves / Who is 'we'?" asking the reader to consider who is implicated. Rich or not, questions of time, ambition, and exhaustion plague the wife.

The women's less accomplished paintings are displayed in special shows
(The galleries echo with the women's missing works)
(The masterpieces they never made)
(With techniques they were never trained in)
(Perfected with time they never had)

In the poem, "The Pelvic Bone," Bludworth de Barrios turns her attention to birth, mothering, and postpartum. The reader experiences the tenderness and power of birth, and the slippage between daughter, mother, and grandmother. The pronouns and subjects shift seamlessly from "we" to "I" to "the woman." Questions of who is holding whom and who belongs to whom, "I do not belong to the child (except I do)," bubble up as this poem explores the body as portal and doorway. "The Pelvic Bone" brings up struggles between artmaking and motherhood, but beyond that, it interrogates the maintenance of a self, "I relinquish my bladder my priorities my attention my thoughts appearing / like loose strands." Those strands ripple throughout the book. Strands that connect the speaker to a matriarchal line, to her daughter, and ultimately to herself. "The mother plucks out 'herself,' a portion of 'herself' to place on the / nightstand / Like the books or the project something she meant to get back to." Rich Wife is not interested in mom hacks, the Pomodoro method, or optimization. It is interested in questions of selfhood.
     My writing group wants me to answer: WHAT IS THIS BOOK? What is it doing? To answer this question, I'll leave you with an instruction from the last poem, "Hera": "I do not like these tunnels, Hera may think / It is very difficult to make a new tunnel / (One must enter a tunnel, or make one)."