Elusive Reclusive

Emily Dickenson circa 1847 (from: Wikipedia)

"A photograph believed to be an extremely rare image of Emily Dickinson has surfaced in her home town of Amherst, Massachusetts, showing a young woman in old-fashioned clothes, a tiny smile on her lips and a hand extended solicitously towards her friend. There is, currently, only one authenticated photograph of Dickinson in existence – the well-known image of the poet as a teenager in 1847. But Amherst College believes an 1859 daguerreotype may well also be an image of the reclusive, beloved poet, by now in her mid-20s and sitting with her recently widowed friend, Kate Scott Turner. If so, it will shed new light on the poet who, by the late 1850s, was withdrawing further and further from the world."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
Read more...

Photo from Amhurst College Archives: Emily Dickenson (left)
and Kate Scott Turner (1859)

"[...] staircase of wounds"

"We know from Emily Dickinson that true poetry is painful. A real poem made her 'feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,' which by all evidence she took to be a good thing: 'I know that is poetry.' If it is, then so much the better for Harm, Hillary Gravendyk’s first book of poems, whose descriptions will disfigure sensitive readers much more than commonplace poetic lobotomy. Her book is full of pain: a 'skein of plastic braided into the mouth,' 'organs flat as mirrors,' a 'throat closed by what opens inside it,' '[t]he kind of hunger that swallows you,' '[b]reath, threading its tiny needles,' and a 'bright needle, punched through the neck.'
     While at times she can be lightheartedly funny — 'I was promised only good things,' Gravendyk writes in 'Appetite' in the voice of Appetite itself, petulant and credulous like a child — mostly she is out to evoke serious pain. Gravendyk’s work isn’t dramatic, but it evokes drama; she doesn’t despair, but she offers few of the usual hopes."
— Adam Plunkett, Los Angeles Review of Books
Read more...
Buy this book here...