Em Press
Mill Valley, CA
ISBN 0-9632085-2-7
$15.00
[16] unbound sheets, 5 x 7
Numbered edition of 146
Bundle, bunch, cluster, tuft. Of muscle,
fibre, nerve. Leaves, flowers, roots,
growing closely from one point.
Printing in installments.
Emily Dickinson’s poem cache,
found in bundles, ribbon-tied.
Fifteen small broadsides of poems by Sari Broner, Killarney Clary, Norma Cole, Beverly Dahlen, Renata Ewing, Kathleen Fraser, Dale Going, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Denise Lawson, Aífe Murray, Denise Newman, Eléna Rivera, Carol Snow, Lily Iona Souci
Colophon
Centaur, Arrighi and Castellar types, Rives de Lin paper, Mikado ribbon
Designed and letterpress printed by Dale Going
Thank you Peter Rutledge Koch & Joyce Wilson
[Printed on a Vandercook press at the Press in Tuscany Alley, San Francisco]
[8 colors of ink]
The inspiration of Emily Dickinson:
To see the quiet weave of the fine linen stationery and the pinholes where those leaves had been so carefully threaded together to make the fascicles, the forty or more manuscript books she folded and tucked and left in her drawer (or chest) for posterity, and to see the poems written and rewritten, sometimes even revised after they had been carefully copied onto these sometimes edged in gold leaf, sometimes embossed (with a capitol building or a queen’s head or flower) pages, enables one to see more clearly the writer for whom the choice of each word mattered, the woman who diligently recorded her words on exquisite paper then lovingly laid the little books of lyric away in a place where they were sure to be discovered. Old questions come to mind. Had anyone known of the poet Dickinson’s book making enterprise? Had anyone seen her threading and unthreading the little fascicles? Had any contemporary suspected there were all these poems?
– Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson