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THIRD PLACE WINNER of THE POETRY BOX CHAPBOOK PRIZE, 2020
Off Coldwater Canyon explores the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles. The poems contained in this small volume hold a haunting, unmistakable relevance for those living through today’s near-universal experience of global pandemic. Echoing an era described by the poet as the impossible time, they hold out the possibility of survival in the midst of great sorrow and loss, and the attribution of meaning and purpose to the life that remains.
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Emerson’s poetry is so honest, its narrative so clear, that his compassion runs through every line: in the care he gave to his dying friends, the comfort he later tried to offer as a caregiver for strangers, and the blunt descriptions of the hollow aftermath and long road to recovery. This is a big-hearted poet, and a book that remembers and doesn’t look away.
-Amy Miller, Contest Judge 2020
In this breathtakingly beautiful, heartbreakingly personal elegy to friends and lovers lost in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, C.W. Emerson maps a journey from innocence hungry for experience to experience hungry for lost innocence.
-Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem
Emerson dignifies the paths of those who have crisscrossed his own with a limpid accuracy that pinpoints and transpierces the essence of our fleeting existence and names it, a quality that destines this collection to become a classic in league with Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats.
-Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium
