The cover is beautiful, the pages feel luxurious, the photographs feel so special, and it's all put together with incredible care.

Lyndall Gordon, a recent biographer, argued that Dickinson was epileptic and feared suffering one of her seizures in public. Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime, all anonymously; publication was, as she put it, as “foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin. It felt like a four star read to me simply because many of the ideas didn't feel finished or realized. The shocks are in the words, with other, lingering, aftershocks following in the visual details of their settings.There are some really standout poems to me in this but the sentence that hit me hardest was “I have no life but this to lead”, as if Emily from centuries away knows what I’m going through, what I’m thinking���. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The poems of Emily Dickinson began as marks made in ink or pencil on paper, usually the standard stationery that came into her family’s household. Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime.

Firsthand stories about the Dickinsons were still told in the early nineteen-nineties, when I was a student at Amherst.Except that the actual manuscript has multiple anomalies, cross-outs, and alternate words surrounding the lines I have just quoted.

An insightful new volume, The Gorgeous Nothings, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, also provides a fascinating glimpse of Dickinson by assembling images documenting the poetry she scrawled on repurposed envelopes — envelopes that have themselves been elevated to a new sort of art.The poems often detail their own state of evanescence: in “A 316,” Dickinson addresses the “sumptuous moment” and entreats it to “Slower go / That I may gloat on thee. It is a pleasant fancy to imagine that Dickinson, ever the tortoise in relation to rushing time, knew that, in the end, we would catch up to her. This exquisitely produced book [ The Gorgeous Nothings]—lovingly curated by Bervin and Werner—allows you to encounter Emily Dickinson’s ‘envelope poems’ in full-color facsimile for the first time. You can find support for any of these theories, and many others, in the poems; their quirks, though evened out by her early editors, nevertheless lend credence to the idea that she was a familiar New England stereotype, the flighty, eccentric, proto-spinster daughter.