Envelope Poems

"Here is a book almost as rare as its author, Emily Dickinson (18301886)." -- 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 mediumcomposing 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 "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." -- Dan Chiasson - The New Yorker "This exquisitely produced book The Gorgeous Nothingslovingly curated by Bervin and Wernerallows you to encounter Emily Dickinsons envelope poems in full-color facsimile for the first time. Its an experience suspended between reading and looking, of toggling between those two modes of perception, and it thoroughly refreshes both. " -- Ben Lerner "The 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." -- Holland Cotter - The New York Times "Magnificent: the absolute perfect combination of solid scholarship and art." -- Susan Howe "The Gorgeous Nothings is a rare gift for all poetry lovers." -- Craig Morgan Teicher - NPR "Visual poets around the world will soon be mining these endlessly suggestive fragments." -- Marjorie Perloff - Times Literary Supplement "We see from The Gorgeous Nothings the way [Dickinson's] art and life were not separate endeavors. Dickinson wrote poetry every time she addressed or received an envelope. Whenever there was paper around, she put quill or pencil right to it. Dickinson, master of paradox. started these un-conversations with nobody, and so many years after her death, nowin curled script, with their sweet, perfect Ms and half-formed Ys, unpublished and unseen until nowthey speak to us. And they have so much yet to say." -- Brenda Shaughnessy - Los Angeles Times "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 envelopesenvelopes that have themselves been elevated to a new sort of art." -- Chicago Tribune "For years, Dickinson critics have been looking for some kind of order among the manuscriptssome way to describe or theorize the ''filing system'' that the poet left and we found. In The Gorgeous Nothings, instead, what''s restored to these traces of the work is a sense of occasioned disorder. What''s been preserved through time in her handwriting is the decision to occupy the page. The page becomes just as important as the writing." -- Los Angeles Review of Books "The beautiful reproduction, on the pages of The Gorgeous Nothings, of what might seem only negligible scraps of waste paper brings us closer to the restlessness of the constantly thinking poet who, in her later years, repeatedly seized her pencil and a fragment of an envelope to write about the lowliest and the most exalted states of being." -- Helen Vendler - The New Republic "The Gorgeous Nothings is one of the most ambitious, important literary feats of the year. Its stunning, revelatory, and it functions as a key text to Dickinsons oeuvre: seeing

Arguably Americas greatest poet, Emily Dickinson (18301886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems during her lifetime. Jen Bervins work includes The Dickinson Composites, The Desert, and Nets. Marta Werners books include Emily Dickinsons Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing and Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Emily Dickinsons Late Fragments and Related Texts.