Shopping, or The End of Time

Emily Bludworth de Barrios is a poet whose books and chapbooks include Women, Money, Children, Ghosts; Splendor; and Extraordinary Power. Her poems have appeared in publications such as The Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Oxford Poetry, and Cincinnati Review. She was raised in Houston, Cairo, and Caracas, and now lives in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, with her husband and three children.

Acknowledgments Ravine Part 1. Women Who begat the earth? 80 to 90 percent of my awareness When I was 13 there was a girl I knew My gravestone The mother should be as stunning With pleasure the young men Initially I was a beautiful woman A naked woman is perched in the window The doves were moaning crying cooing calling A map is a picture that shows where things are Part 2. Money My husband fidgets with the inner mechanism of the country The culture oriented itself toward shopping In my childhood The economy is synchronized and delicate In this house we loved My darkest thoughts In the middle of the disaster nothing bad had happened to me My new blue kitchen cabinets painted blue Is the wind so dirty? Our house (among all the homes in the city) Part 3. Children A ghost is what you call a woman The new mothers The unbearable can actually be borne My pregnancy was a long and happy nightmare Nothing could be sweeter than JoaquIn is my favorite child Statues or knotted ropes or scored stone I ask JoaquIn if he likes the music AndrEs said Woe was the sentiment Part 4. Ghosts Sitting at the lip of the tunnel to the past It is sad What is your ideal life I am going to make a poem We each of us carry Neptune is a place we'll never go All the time art is falling It is turbulent to be a person Hypothetical Painting

"Her narratives are less built as accumulations than as a cadence of narrative waves, rolling through rise and fall to either a final crescent, or a sweep up to the shore of the space beyond that final word. . . . There is a swell and swoop of her narrative, but also a subtle music across that same lyric that itself fills and diminishes across such a lovely spectrum of her lines. One is nearly required to close one's eyes to truly listen."--Rob Mclennan "An extraordinary journey through family life, consumerism, guilt, time and space, and the crises of climate and capitalism. A beautiful, profound book without sentimentality or reductionism: a raw truthfulness arrived at through difficult work of the heart."--Jack Underwood, author of A Year in the New Life "Bludworth de Barrios is a kind of sorcerer-historian, an uncanny conjurer of terrestrial relations, a maneuverer of periscopes. This is a book of fierce attention to and engagement with what it means to be a person, a parent, a subject of a nation-state, a consumer, an heir to other people's ghosts, a hungry mind, a participant in both hope and horror as one small part of 'the fluttering world.' It left me rattled and wonderstruck."--Robin Myers, translator of Copy by Dolores Dorantes "Marrying novelistic breadth and autobiographical intimacy, Shopping, or The End of Time invents a new poetic genre: the sociolyric. Impersonal and personal at once, these poems shift from collective to individual experience with dizzying rapidity. Their deft lines jump-cut across social experiences connected inequitably by a consumer culture thriving on violence against women and the Earth's accelerating destruction. This is an innovative collection with impressive critical and emotional range."--Brian Teare