From Library Journal This intriguing new collection of letters and poems, compiled by two noted Dickinson scholars, reveals a little-known side of one of America's best-loved poets.

Susan Dickinson was clearly a friend as well as one of the most valued readers of her sister-in-law's poetry-but was she its inspiration, as well? Hart and Smith let the reader decide.

Yet editors Ellen Hart and Martha Smith aren't in the business of outing anyone they prefer to simply present the correspondence in all its passionate oddity. They are not merely warm, in the 19th-century way they are fierce, even erotic, in the kind of attachment they express. Like Dickinson's poetry, these letters are a curious business: half epistles, half poems, idiosyncratically capitalized, punctuated, and spaced. In fact, she wrote more letters to Susan than to anyone else, despite the fact that at one point Susan lived only a stone's throw away. For years, both before and after a painful break in their relationship, Dickinson wrote ardent letters to her friend (and eventual sister-in-law) Susan Huntington Dickinson. As it turns out, however, they might have looked closer to home. For years, biographers have speculated about the male mentor who inspired Dickinson's work, naming intellectual figures like Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Samuel Bowles as possible candidates. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters' genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page.' Renee Tursi, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Review Emily Dickinson is a figure of intense contradictions: the hermit, the spinster, the frail woman in white who nonetheless wrote poems of almost painfully turbulent passion. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive. For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson's poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet's life and work. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. Product Description Emily Dickinson's uncensored and breathtaking letters, poems, and letter-poems to her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington DickinsonFor the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate FeaturesĪbout Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate

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