The Older American Poet

C.W. Emerson

has received numerous international honors, including as winner of two prizes from Poetry International: the C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize (2018) and co-winner of the 2023-24 Summer Chapbook competition. Emerson’s poetry and literary criticism have appeared in books and journals including Harvard Review, Oxford University Press, Greensboro Review, Tupelo Quarterly and others. He is the author of a chapbook, Off Coldwater Canyon (The Poetry Box, 2021) and the prize-winning portfolio, The Thoracic Diaries, forthcoming in Poetry International.

I’m pleased to announce that my debut full-length poetry collection, Luminous Body, Glittering Ash, is available for pre-order from London-based Eyewear Publishing Ltd., as part of a series of special editions to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Black Spring Press Group.

Luminous Body, Glittering Ash explores the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles and the complexities of losing friends, lovers, and family. The poems in this volume hold a haunting, unmistakable relevance as we continue to navigate a seemingly interminable global pandemic. Echoing an era described by the poet as “the impossible time,” these poems 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.

Bringing this book to press has been an exercise in patience, persistence, and faith; I am so grateful to all of you who have stood by me as the process unfolded. Big abrazos to Sandra Alcosser, Cyrus Cassells, Lise Goett and Cecilia Woloch, all of whom have blessed the book with kind words of recognition and praise.

I look forward to your comments and continued support as the book makes its way into the world this year. I hope and believe that the poems in the book can continue to provide messages of strength, hope, and resilience to help us through “the impossible times.”

Wishing peace and love to all,

Advance Praise for Luminous Body, Glittering Ash

The radiant from which Luminous Body, Glittering Ash emanates is the body’s own perishable luminosity, these poems the lyric record of the body’s trajectory as a falling star—meteoric, brief—during the height of the AIDS pandemic. Like those meteors, Emerson convinces us, our transits leave a crypto-crystalline gleam, yet the heart, to be safe, leaves the body, turns invisible, but continues to throw sparks long after it stops. Emerson’s deftly trenchant poems never succumb to bathos but pinpoint the l’heure exquise of our fleeting existence and name 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

Off Coldwater Canyon

Third Place Winner of The Poetry Book 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.

"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 Goettt — author of Leprosarium

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