Luminous Body, Glittering Ash – C. W. Emerson

Description

Luminous Body, Glittering Ash

by C. W. Emerson
Paperback

“I was falling in love with the world, and everything in the world was dying.”

In Luminous Body, Glittering Ash, C. W. Emerson offers a haunting, luminous poetry collection shaped by love, loss, and the fragile radiance of the body in a time of catastrophe. These poems move through caretaking, desire, grief, and memory with a voice that is at once intimate and unflinching, capturing what it meant to live, love, and survive during the height of the AIDS epidemic.

By turns erotic, austere, and elegiac, Emerson’s work attends closely to the natural world and to the perishable brilliance of human connection. Central sequences such as “The Impossible Time” and “Coldwater Canyon Suite” trace the experience of being young and unmoored in an era marked by relentless loss, rendering private grief as collective witness.

Praised by poets including Cyrus Cassells, Lise Goett, and Cecilia Woloch, this collection refuses sentimentality while embracing vulnerability. Luminous Body, Glittering Ash stands as both memorial and affirmation, a record of lives lived fiercely and briefly, and of the sparks they continue to leave behind.

A vital book for readers of queer poetry, AIDS-era literature, and work that honors the sensual and the sacred without apology.