The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems

Author(s): Emily Dickinson; Jen Bervin (Editor); Marta Werner (Editor); Susan Howe (Foreword by)

Poetry & Plays

The Gorgeous Nothings -- the first full-color facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson's manuscripts ever to appear -- is a deluxe edition of her late writings, presenting this crucially important, experimental late work exactly as she wrote it on scraps of envelopes. A never-before-possible glimpse into the process of one of our most important poets.The book presents all the envelope writings -- 52 -- reproduced life-size in full color both front and back, with an accompanying transcription to aid in the reading, allowing us to enjoy this little-known but important body of Dickinson's writing. Envisioned by the artist Jen Bervin and made possible by the extensive research of the Dickinson scholar Marta L. Werner, this book offers a new understanding and appreciation of the genius of Emily Dickinson.


Product Information

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. Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and two of literary criticism, Susan Howe's recent collection of poems That This, published by New Directions won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Three CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, Thiefth, Souls of the Labadie Tract, and Frolic Architecture were released on the Blue Chopsticks label (2005; 2011). Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and served as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets between 2000-2006. In fall, 2009 she was awarded a Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin. Grenfell Press published a fine press edition of "Frolic Architecture with photographic prints by James Welling in 2009. Recently she was an Artist In Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In October, 2013 her word collages were exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the Whitney Biennial Spring, 2014. A limited press edition of Tom Tit Tot (the word collages which amount to a series poem) with art work by R.H. Quaytman has just been published by MoMA in New York, and Spontaneous Particulars:The Telepathy of Archives, (2014) published by Christine Burgin and New Directions.

General Fields

  • : 9780811221757
  • : W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated
  • : W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated
  • : 0.002
  • : October 2013
  • : 313mm X 246mm X 33mm
  • : United States
  • : November 2013
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Emily Dickinson; Jen Bervin (Editor); Marta Werner (Editor); Susan Howe (Foreword by)
  • : Hardback
  • : 1311
  • : English
  • : 811.4
  • : 272
  • : DCF
  • : Illustrationsstrations (colour)