While Love Stirs: A Novel

by Lorna Seilstad

Overview

At the turn of the 20th century an independent young woman with new ideas must decide between two suitors while in pursuit of her dreams.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780800721824
Publisher:	Baker Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/06/2014
Series:	Gregory Sisters Series , #2
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Arguably America’s greatest poet, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems during her lifetime.

Jen Bervin’s work includes The Dickinson Composites, The Desert, and Nets.

Marta Werner’s books include Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing and Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts.

Editorial Reviews

Dickinson’s incandescent thinking is everywhere on display, and the makeshift nature of the scraps gives us a vivid idea of what composition must have felt like for a woman whose thoughts raced far ahead of her ability to capture them.

Dan Chiasson - The New Yorker

This exquisitely produced book The Gorgeous Nothings—lovingly curated by Bervin and Werner—allows you to encounter Emily Dickinson’s ‘envelope poems’ in full-color facsimile for the first time. It’s an experience suspended between reading and looking, of toggling between those two modes of perception, and it thoroughly refreshes both.”

Ben Lerner

The first and immediate shocks are in the words, with other, lingering, aftershocks following in the visual details of their settings. The great thing about [The Gorgeous Nothings] is, of course, that it gives us all of this, complete.

Holland Cotter - The New York Times

Magnificent: the absolute perfect combination of solid scholarship and art.

Susan Howe

The Gorgeous Nothings is a rare gift for all poetry lovers.”

Craig Morgan Teicher - NPR

Visual poets around the world will soon be mining these endlessly suggestive fragments.

Marjorie Perloff - Times Literary Supplement

We see from The Gorgeous Nothings the way [Dickinson's] art and life were not separate endeavors. Dickinson wrote poetry every time she addressed or received an envelope. Whenever there was paper around, she put quill or pencil right to it. Dickinson, master of paradox. started these un-conversations with nobody, and so many years after her death, now—in curled script, with their sweet, perfect Ms and half-formed Ys, unpublished and unseen until now—they speak to us. And they have so much yet to say.”

Brenda Shaughnessy - Los Angeles Times

An insightful new volume, The Gorgeous Nothings, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, also provides a fascinating glimpse of Dickinson by assembling images documenting the poetry she scrawled on repurposed envelopes—envelopes that have themselves been elevated to a new sort of art.”

Chicago Tribune

For years, Dickinson critics have been looking for some kind of order among the manuscripts—some way to describe or theorize the ''filing system'' that the poet left and we found. In The Gorgeous Nothings, instead, what''s restored to these traces of the work is a sense of occasioned disorder. What''s been preserved through time in her handwriting is the decision to occupy the page. The page becomes just as important as the writing.”

Los Angeles Review of Books

The beautiful reproduction, on the pages of The Gorgeous Nothings, of what might seem only negligible scraps of waste paper brings us closer to the restlessness of the constantly thinking poet who, in her later years, repeatedly seized her pencil and a fragment of an envelope to write about the lowliest and the most exalted states of being.”

Helen Vendler - The New Republic

The Gorgeous Nothings is one of the most ambitious, important literary feats of the year. It’s stunning, revelatory, and it functions as a key text to Dickinson’s oeuvre: seeing it demands a tectonic shift in the way we read her, brings her back to us even more extremely idiosyncratic than we could have guessed.”

The Rumpus