Synopses & Reviews
Another gorgeous copublication with the Christine Burgin Gallery, Envelope Poems is a compact, clothbound gift book, a full-color selection from The Gorgeous Nothings.
Although a very prolific poet, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen poems. Instead, she created small handmade books. In her later years, she stopped producing these, but she continued to write a great deal, and at her death she left behind many poems, drafts, and letters. It is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson’s later writings that we find the envelope poems gathered here. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy — addressed to no one and everyone at once.
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).
Review
"[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 medium — composing in response to the confines of her writing world rather than despite it." Jessica Michalofsky, Quarterly Conversation
Review
"[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 medium — composing in response to the confines of her writing world rather than despite it." Jessica Michalofsky, Quarterly Conversation
Review
"Visual poets around the world will soon be mining these endlessly suggestive fragments." Marjorie Perloff, Times Literary Supplement
Review
"The shocks are in the words, with other, lingering, aftershocks following in the visual details of their settings. The great thing about this indispensable book is... that it gives us all of this, complete." Holland Cotter, The New York Times
Review
"[The Gorgeous Nothings] is a rare gift for all poetry lovers." Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
Review
"This exquisitely produced book [The Gorgeous Nothings] — lovingly curated by Bervin and Werner — allows you to encounter Emily Dickinson’s 'envelope poems' in full-color facsimile for the first time. It’s an experience suspended between reading and looking, of toggling between those two modes of perception, and it thoroughly refreshes both." Ben Lerner, The New Yorker
Review
"Magnificent: the absolute perfect combination of solid scholarship and art." Susan Howe
About the Author
Arguably America’s greatest poet, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote eighteen hundred poems.
Jen Bervin is a Brooklyn-based visual artist and writer whose works often combine strong conceptual elements and a minimalist’s eye for the poetic and essential. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in more than thirty collections, including The Walker Art Center and The J. Paul Getty Museum. She has published eight books, including Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings, named a Best Book of the Year by Hyperallergic and The New Yorker. Jen Bervin’s work receives support from Creative Capital and the Rauschenberg Foundation.
Marta L. Werner is the foremost scholar of Dickinson’s late work and the editor of Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios and Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts.