Author Description

"In the tradition of writers like Lucie Brock-Broido and Janet Holmes, Rosa Lane allows the mysteries of Emily Dickinson's life to blossom into an incisive exploration of feminist poetics, innovation, and the gendered, temporally bound nature of artistic audience. "Pull my chair / into dinner's envelope," Lane writes in lines as lyrical as they are mysterious. The title of her stunning volume, memorializing the last two words that Dickinson wrote, which are engraved on her headstone, evokes a rich tradition of poetic voice as an alterity that speaks through the writer. For Homer, it was the muses, for the great Modernist H.D., it was the unconscious mind, and for Jack Spicer, it was radio waves from outer space. Here, Lane shows us that otherness that speaks through the poet as inheritance, as history. Yet this history is imbued with new agency and a fresh sociopolitical urgency as Lane considers questions about sexuality and silence in Dickinson's artistic legacy: "Vortex of heart, or / lone star fixed -- barred coupling. I / dissent, burn a scream / my sapphic love of her--doomed, / disobedient. Damned shut!" This is a necessary and beautifully rendered book"--