Envelope Poems
BOOK SUMMARY
Although a very prolific poet—and arguably America's greatest—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems. Instead, she created at home small handmade books. When, in her later years, she stopped producing these, she was still writing a great deal, and at her death she left behind many poems, drafts, and letters. It is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson's later writings that we find the envelope poems gathered here. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy—addressed to no one and everyone at once.
Full-color facsimiles are accompanied by Marta L. Werner and Jen Bervin's pioneering transcriptions of Dickinson's handwriting. Their transcriptions allow us to read the texts, while the facsimiles let us see exactly what Dickinson wrote (the variant words, crossings-out, dashes, directional fields, spaces, columns, and overlapping planes).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arguably America's greatest poet, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems during her lifetime.
Jen Bervin's work includes The Dickinson Composites, The Desert, and Nets.
Marta Werner's books include Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing and Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts.
PRAISE
"Here is a book almost as rare as its author, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)." —Larry Smith, New York Journal of Books
"[The Gorgeous Nothings] opens up an aspect of her craft that suggests she was, in the so-called late ecstatic period of her career, experimenting with creating texts in relation to the visual, spatial, and technological possibilities of her medium—composing in response to the confines of her writing world rather than despite it." —Jessica Michalofsky, Quarterly Conversation
"The Gorgeous Nothings is proof that one of our most important poets can still amaze and teach us new thing about the practice of poetry." —Hannah Star Rogers, Tupelo Quarterly
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Hardcover paper over boards
96 pages
Non-fiction
7.3 in H | 5.3 in W | 0.6 in T | 0.5 lb
