A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century
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Book Overview
A passionate and deeply researched reassessment of Emily Dickinson's life and singular legacy in American arts and letters
We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote:
My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--
...
Though I than He-- may longer live
He longer must--than I--
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--
Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn's literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today.
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