"Be terrified. "" It's you I love, ""perfect man, ""Greek God, my own; ""but I know you'll go, "" betray me, stray""from home.""So better by far for ""me if you were stone."--from "Medusa" Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfris of famous -- and infamous -- male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.

Carol Ann Duffy, CBE, FRSL (born 23 December 1955 in Glasgow) is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's poet laureate in May 2009.[1] She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly bisexual person to hold the position, as well as the first laureate to be chosen in the 21st century.[2]

The World's Wife is Carol Ann Duffy's first themed collection of poems, which was first published in 1999. The collection takes characters, stories, histories and myths which focus on men, and in Duffy's renowned feminist way, presents them anew for the public to look at the women that were previously obscured behind the men. It is a set text on some AS Syllabuses of English Literature in England and Wales.