I think it’s reasonable to struggle with the point-of-view in Bludworth de Barrios’s Rich Wife. Who or what exactly is the rich wife in relation to the poet? To what degree does it take a rich wife to know a rich wife? And to what degree do women live their entire lives conscious that someone holds them to whatever they think a rich wife could possibly be or should be. Should the book be read, then, as ongoing cultural critique of wealth, as persona, where this “rich wife” has to hold together ego, expectation, appearances, and well-being? How many different codes does “rich wife” express in the age of the trad wife? Is the kept-ness performed in Rich Wife proposed as an insider’s view or a feminist dilemma?
Bludworth de Barrio’s book represents a series of women (or, at least, impressions of women) that we’re all aware of. Which is a notable risk for the book. In communicating the familiar, it draws on well-worn tropes that might only register the objectionable rather than involve the reader in an extended and active feminist critique. Most who read this book will already be aware of the unjust position women have systemically been assigned. This book, however, is not a bland cataloguing of what its reader already know about feminism. It clearly rises above its tropiness with two concrete approaches to its subject.
First, Bludworth de Barrio’s poetics feels like an atonal orchestral work. The kind whose notes touch the familiar, but also deviate from that familiarity in an unsettling but satisfactory fashion. The rich wife in her rich house, but she’s far enough from the picture window that you can’t really see her looking out at you. The rich wife who feels like she’s not like the other rich wives she sees at her child’s swimming lessons. The rich wife in the mythological figure of Hera, whose only pleasures are what imagine a rich wife must be thinking. The rich wife as the cashier a man has identified as rich-wife-like enough that he invites her to come out with him. Aren’t all these observations about lifestyle and deep complacency a self-shaming or self-justifying or self-obsessed version of the rich wife’s life? Yes. And it’s the book’s iterative monostich structure that evokes, for me, that atonal orchestral work. The poet understands this “woman”’s life for all of its mundane concerns—the mundane amplified to a level of daily life events.
Which leads me to the second of the book’s successes. The poet’s understanding of the rich wife’s position pulls from knowledge gained as an insider and outsider. She can envision this life, its particularities. So the book feels both self-critical and overall critical. And I’m not entirely sure this knowledge comes from the cultural gaze affixed on all women, or if it’s from the poet’s background. She is eruditely aware of literary characters who would have existed as conscious responses to whatever the “rich wife” has historically meant. She is also aware of the literary figures the term applies to, whether it’s writers like Edith Wharton or Amy Lowell, who benefited from personal fortunes, or it’s Mark Twain’s wife, who would have staged the family’s society in a room that could be read as the inside of an egg. But the position of subject (where “subject” occupies the position of originator of sentence and broader category of concerns that’s under consideration) is most satisfyingly addressed in the poem, “The Pelvic Bone.” Where the poet is mother to her daughter and daughter to her mother, shifting back and forth between these positions. Think of it somewhere between “conflation” and “blurring.” In much the same way Bludworth de Barrios thinks through the figure of Hera, who is both the Greek goddess and the name of her daughter. And who stands as possibly an original “rich wife” in figuring what unfairnesses came together in history to “understand” what a rich wife even is.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.