Another gorgeous copublication with the Christine Burgin Gallery, Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems is a compact clothbound gift book, a full-color selection from The Gorgeous Nothings.
The Envelope Poems is a small gift-book selection of Emily Dickinson's writings on envelope scraps. A full-color edition, The Envelope Poems presents a selection in facsimile publication of her crucially important, most experimental late work. The Envelope Poems is a selection from a larger collection, previously co-published by New Directions and Christine Burgin: Emily Dickinson's The Gorgeous Nothings, a project created by the visual artist Jen Bervin and the noted Dickinson scholar Marta L. Werner, which presented all of Emily Dickinson's late compositions on envelopes. The Envelope Poems collects color facsimiles of 30 of her envelope writings with visual transcriptions by Bervin and Werner. This selection of these facsimiles of Dickinson's late work on envelopes makes this poetry available in a small, affordable gift-size cloth edition.
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).
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
The Gorgeous Nothings is a rare gift for all poetry lovers.--Craig Morgan Teicher
The Gorgeous Nothings is one of the most ambitious, important literary feats of the year. It's stunning, revelatory, and it functions as a key text to Dickinson's oeuvre: seeing it demands a tectonic shift in the way we read her, brings her back to us even more extremely idiosyncratic than we could have guessed.
Dickinson's 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.--Dan Chiasson
Visual poets around the world will soon be mining these endlessly suggestive fragments.--Marjorie Perloff
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.
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Pub Date: October 04, 2016
0.5" H x 7.1" L x 5.2" W
96 pages
hardcover