Martha Nell Smith – författare

Emily Dickinson wrote a "letter to the world" and left it lying in her drawer more than a century ago. This widely admired epistle was her poems, which were never conventionally published in book form during her lifetime. Since the posthumous discovery of her work, general readers and literary scholars alike have puzzled over this paradox of wanting to communicate widely and yet apparently refusing to publish. In this pathbreaking study, Martha Nell Smith unravels the paradox by boldly recasting two of the oldest and still most frequently asked questions about Emily Dickinson: Why didn't she publish more poems while she was alive? and Who was her most important contemporary audience?Regarding the question of publication, Smith urges a reconception of the act of publication itself. She argues that Dickinson did publish her work in letters and in forty manuscript books that circulated among a cultured network of correspondents, most important of whom was her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Rather than considering this material unpublished because unprinted, Smith views its alternative publication as a conscious strategy on the poet's part, a daring poetic experiment that also included Dickinson's unusual punctuation, line breaks, stanza divisions, calligraphic orthography, and bookmaking-all the characteristics that later editors tried to standardize or eliminate in preparing the poems for printing.Dickinson's relationship with her most important reader, Sue Dickinson, has also been lost or distorted by multiple levels of censorship, Smith finds. Emphasizing the poet-sustaining aspects of the passionate bonds between the two women, Smith shows that their relationship was both textual and sexual. Based on study of the actual holograph poems, Smith reveals the extent of Sue Dickinson's collaboration in the production of poems, most notably "Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers." This finding will surely challenge the popular conception of the isolated, withdrawn Emily Dickinson.Well-versed in poststructuralist, feminist, and new textual criticism, Rowing in Eden uncovers the process by which the conventional portrait of Emily Dickinson was drawn and offers readers a chance to go back to original letters and poems and look at the poet and her work through new eyes. It will be of great interest to a wide audience in literary and feminist studies.

Alicia Ostriker’s artistic and intellectual productions as a poet, critic, and essayist over the past 50 years are protean and have been profoundly influential to generations of readers, writers, and critics. In all her writings, both the feminist and the human engage fiercely with the material and metaphysical world. Ostriker is a poet concerned with questions of social justice, equality, religion, and how to live in a world marked by both beauty and tragedy.Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker engages Ostriker’s poetry from throughout her career, including her first volume Songs, her award-winning collection The Imaginary Lover, and her more recent work in the collections No Heaven, the volcano sequence, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and Waiting for the Light. Like her literary criticism and essays, Ostriker’s poetry explores themes of feminism, Jewish life, family, and social justice.With insightful essays—some newly written for this collection—poets and literary critics including Toi Derricotte, Daisy Fried, Cynthia Hogue, Tony Hoagland, and Eleanor Wilner illuminate and open new pathways for critical engagement with Alicia Ostriker’s lifetime of poetic work.

This companion to America's greatest woman poet showcases the diversity and excellence that characterize the thriving field of Dickinson studies. Covers biographical approaches of Dickinson, the historical, political and cultural contexts of her work, and its critical reception over the yearsConsiders issues relating to the different formats in which Dickinson's lyrics have been published ? manuscript, print, halftone and digital facsimileProvides incisive interventions into current critical discussions, as well as opening up fresh areas of critical inquiryFeatures new work being done in the critique of nineteenth-century American poetry generally, as well as new work being done in Dickinson studiesDesigned to be used alongside the Dickinson Electronic Archives, an online resource developed over the past ten years

A long-buried love story comes to life.Emily Dickinson as you’ve never read her before.Emily Dickinson is one of our greatest poets. When her work was published posthumously in the 1890s, she almost instantly became a sensation. And yet, for one hundred years, her personal life was subject to censorship and misinterpretation, with little regard for her sister-in-law, neighbour and best friend: ‘dear Sue’.Susan Huntington Dickinson was Emily’s first reader, her greatest critic and collaborator – and, as their correspondence shows, the true love of her life. In June 1852, Emily sent a letter to Susan with the tender instruction, open me carefully…Immerse yourself in these sapphic letters spanning thirty-six years and witness a love that matures to become as steadfast as a heartbeat. Gone is Emily the lonely spinster, isolated in her room; here arrives a passionate, vibrant woman who had an intense spiritual, romantic and intellectual connection with another woman.Edited and curated by two Dickinson scholars, Open Me Carefully includes twenty poems and a letter that had never been attributed to Susan before. It will make you laugh and it will break your heart – it is for anyone who has ever been in love.'Iridescent, puzzling, explosive' The New York Times Book Review