Envelope Poems [Hardcover]

Although a very prolific poetand arguably Americas greatestEmily Dickinson (18301886) 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 Dickinsons 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 poignancyaddressed to no one and everyone at once.Here is a book almost as rare as its author, Emily Dickinson (18301886).[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 mediumcomposing in response to the confines of her writing world rather than despite it.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.Dickinsons incandescent thinking is everywhere on display, and the makeshift nature of the scraps gives us a vivid idea of what composition must have felt like for a woman whose thoughts raced far ahead of her ability to capture them.This exquisitely produced bookThe first and immediate shocks are in the words, with other, lingering, aftershocks following in the visual details of their settings. The great thing about [The Gorgeous Nothings] is, of course, that it gives us all of this, complete.Magnificent: the absolute perfect combination of solid scholarship and art.Visual poets around the world will soon be mining these endlessly suggestive fragments.We see fromAn insightful nelãâ