Susan Howe

My Emily Dickinson does more than just explore Dickinson's life and poetics, although it does that expertly. It falls in line with a tradition of books of poets writing about poets who have intensely figured into their conception of poetry. This is more personal than a biography in that it is a writer's concern with Dickinson's place in history and what she was trying to do with her poetry. Howe does a wonderful job of trying to get into the poems through playing with language. It's a place to meet Dickinson as a lover of games and words.

My Emily Dickinson

With exacting rigor and wit, Howe pulls Dickinson free of all the sterile and stuffy belle-of-Amherst cotton wool and shows the poet in touch with elemental forces of nature, and as a prophet in all her radical zealotry and poetic glory. Her Emily Dickinson is a unique American genius, a demon lover of poetry—no neurasthenic spider artist. Howe draws into her discussion Browning, Wuthering Heights, the Civil War, "Master," the great Puritan preachers, captivity narratives, Shakespeare, and phantom lovers. As she chases away narrow and reductive feminist readings of the poet, Howe finds instead a radically powerful and true feminism at work in Dickinson, focusing the whole on that heart-stopping poem "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun." A remarkable and passionate poet-on-poet engagement, My Emily Dickinson frees a great poet from the fetters of being read as a special female neurotic, and sets her against a fiery open sky where "Perception of an object means loosing and losing it...only Mutability certain." My Emily Dickinson won The Before Columbus Foundation Book Award.

Laurie Abrial

This was not an easy read but reading about females creators by a female is so empowering. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in Emily Dickinson obviously, the Shakespearian inspiration in her work but also, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband.

My Emily Dickinson

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