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.

incl PYTHAGOREAN SILENCE, DEFENESTRATION OF PRAGUE

Susan Howe approaches early American literature as pet and critic, blending scholarship with passionate commitment and unique view of her subject. The Birth-mark traces the collusive relationships among tradition, the constitution of critical editions, literary history and criticism, the institutionalized roles of poetry and prose, and the status of gender. Through an examination of the texts and editorial histories of Thomas Shepard's conversion narratives, the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where each text is a wilderness in which a strange and lawless author confronts interpreters and editors eager for settlement. In a concluding interview, Howe comments on her approach and recounts some the crucial biographical events that sparked her interest in early American literature.

Product Description: Pierce-Arrow takes as its shooting off point the figure of Charles S. Peirce, the allusive late nineteenth-century philosopher-scientist and founder of pragmatism, a man always on the periphery of the academic and social establishments yet intimately conjoined with them by birth and upbringing...read more

Product Description: Unavailable for years, The Europe of Trusts contains some of the most acclaimed poetry of Susan Howe, "one of America's foremost experimental writers" (Publishers Weekly). The Europe of Trusts contains three brilliant, landmark books which Susan Howe first published in the early 1980s: The Liberties, Pythagorean Silence, and Defenestration of Prague...read more

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An anthology of poetry and prose reflects on the late-seventeenth-century Labadists, a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Maryland before dissolving in 1722, in a volume that offers insight into the writer's use of evocative and refractive language. Original.