For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence to her neighbor and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. "Open Me Carefully" invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation.
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. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive.
"With spare commentary, Smith ... and Hart ... let these letters speak for themselves. 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

Emily Dickinson wrote a "letter to the world" and left it lying in her drawer more than a century ago. This widely admired epistle was her poems, which were never conventionally published in book form during her lifetime. Since the posthumous discovery of her work, general readers and literary scholars alike have puzzled over this paradox of wanting to communicate widely and yet apparently refusing to publish. In this pathbreaking study, Martha Nell Smith unravels the paradox by boldly recasting two of the oldest and still most frequently asked questions about Emily Dickinson: Why didn't she publish more poems while she was alive? and Who was her most important contemporary audience?

Regarding the question of publication, Smith urges a reconception of the act of publication itself. She argues that Dickinson did publish her work in letters and in forty manuscript books that circulated among a cultured network of correspondents, most important of whom was her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Rather than considering this material unpublished because unprinted, Smith views its alternative publication as a conscious strategy on the poet's part, a daring poetic experiment that also included Dickinson's unusual punctuation, line breaks, stanza divisions, calligraphic orthography, and bookmaking--all the characteristics that later editors tried to standardize or eliminate in preparing the poems for printing.

Dickinson's relationship with her most important reader, Sue Dickinson, has also been lost or distorted by multiple levels of censorship, Smith finds. Emphasizing the poet-sustaining aspects of the passionate bonds between the two women, Smith shows that their relationship was both textual and sexual. Based on study of the actual holograph poems, Smith reveals the extent of Sue Dickinson's collaboration in the production of poems, most notably "Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers." This finding will surely challenge the popular conception of the isolated, withdrawn Emily Dickinson.

Well-versed in poststructuralist, feminist, and new textual criticism, Rowing in Eden uncovers the process by which the conventional portrait of Emily Dickinson was drawn and offers readers a chance to go back to original letters and poems and look at the poet and her work through new eyes. It will be of great interest to a wide audience in literary and feminist studies.

Alicia Ostriker's artistic and intellectual productions as a poet, critic, and essayist over the past 50 years are protean and have been profoundly influential to generations of readers, writers, and critics. Her poetry, literary criticism, all her writings are both feminist and human in their fierce engagements with the material and metaphysical world. Ostriker as a poet is concerned with questions of social justice, equality, religion, and how to live in a world marked by both beauty and tragedy.Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker engages Ostriker's poetry from throughout her career, including her first volume Songs, her award-winning collection The Imaginary Lover, and her more recent work, No Heaven, The Volcano Sequence, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and Waiting for the Light. Like her literary criticism and essays, Ostriker's poetry explores themes of feminism, Jewish life, family, and social justice. Everywoman Her Own Theology includes work from poets and literary critics to illuminate Ostriker's poems and her collections of poetry. With insightful new essays by Jenny Factor, Diana Hume George, Jill Hammer, Richard Tayson, Jacqueline Osherow, Tony Hoagland, Eric Selinger, Wesley McNair, Toi Derricotte, Afaa Michael Weaver, Eleanor Wilner and others, Everywoman Her Own Theology opens new pathways for critical engagements of Ostriker's poetic work.