Pharaoh, pharaoh

the long version

Pharaoh, Pharaoh is a meditation on time, memory, inheritance, and the irony of loss - loss of one's land, of one's past, of love itself. With senses keenly attuned to every nuance of light and landscape, Claudia Emerson Andrews invests her lines with a scriptural fire in this debut collection. She captures equally and with apparent effortlessness the bewilderment of the culturally bereft in the "stuttered eloquence" of an auctioneer, and the evanescence of appearances in the image of a dying firefly "coughing up light."