ABOUT THIS BOOK

Rosa Lane brings a necessary, gender-fluid, feminist perspective to the Emily Dickinson table of debate.

In bold tribute with a title utilizing the last two words Emily Dickinson wrote, Rosa Lane’s Called Back converses with one of our greatest poets in theatrical monologue—decoding secrets amid the blatant. Evoked by epigraphs selected from Dickinson’s work, Lane’s poems, through her I-speaker, reveal the extraordinary to be found in the ordinary and speak to the struggle of sexual orientation, otherness, and the challenges of living in a Calvinistic socioreligious world of oughts and noughts as evidenced in Dickinson’s poems. From sapphic eroticism and subsequent pangs of nonbelonging to tacking next life as a welcome reprieve, poems in Called Back create a de novo dot-connecting lyrical narrative.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Rosa Lane, poet and architect, is author of four poetry collections including Called Back forthcoming from Tupelo Press, selected from the 2022 Summer Open Reading Period; Chouteau’s Chalk, winner, 2017 Georgia Poetry Prize; Tiller North, winner, 2014 Sixteen Rivers Poetry Manuscript Competition; and Roots and Reckonings, a chapbook partially funded by the Maine Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Her work won the 2018 William Matthews Poetry Prize and a Maine Literary Award among other prizes and is forthcoming or has appeared in the Asheville Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Five Points, Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, RHINO Poetry, River Heron Review, Southampton Review, and elsewhere. In addition to her MFA (1982) at Sarah Lawrence where she studied with Jean Valentine, Jane Cooper, Grace Paley, and Tom Lux, Lane earned a 2nd Masters and PhD in sustainable architecture at UC Berkeley. She splits her time between her native home in coastal Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives with her wife.

REVIEWS

“Rosa Lane’s Called Back breaks through the membrane that separates us from Dickinson’s time. Here, we enter Dickinson’s world brand new with the vigor of research re-imagined, obsession expressed with prolific inventiveness and mounting urgency, and language that astonishes in its apt, abundant, and irresistible embrace of sound. This is a book fearless in its approach and lavish in its accomplishment.”

— Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, author of The Promise of a Normal Life: A Novel

"What marvelous, feral, eccentric, sweetly erotic poems! Like a candle in a frosted window, they illuminate—with electrifying language—the shadows of human love."

— Henri Cole, author of Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022

“Reading Called Back is like floating through water, dipping into Lane’s lyric obsession with Emily Dickinson as though on a raft made of erudite diction, vowel sounds, line breaks, and longing. Or it’s like Lane’s doppelganger-speaker—this less constrained Emily—laid her body out across the ocean and said, now float on me. The main conceit is to imagine, evoke, and call back to a new, less-othered Emily Dickinson, a 21st century Emily Dickinson more able to openly “swim / up the fish weir…spawn / in sandy silt along the odic / thighs of the Loire [to] flutter / our little deaths.” This sexy book does not protest. It does not rant or shriek any grievance, though God knows it has a right to. Instead, it gives Emily back the “feral / utterances” Lane suggests her circumstances and time in history forbade her. This radical homage will delight Dickinson scholars and poets alike. And those who don’t know yet how much poetry can liberate them should read it too.”

— Adrian Blevins, author of Status Pending

“Lane’s poems in tribute to Dickinson are a linguistic and lyrical tour de force, an object lesson in how the music of poetry finds purchase in the gaps between sound and silence. Lane's charged lines propel us through space and (un)soundings that bridge breathing and not breathing in poems that can render us as breathless as they leave us brimming. Ruah!”

— Thomas McGuire, author of Steller's Orchid

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents
Othered [I speak] 3
For Eve at the Evergreens 4
The Victorian Dissident 6
French Sardines 8
Gentian 10
Foxglove [disambiguation] 12
Dear Sir, (No. 1) 15
Dear Sir, (No. 4) 16
Sparrow’s Sonnet 17
Dear Sir, (No. 7) 18
My Voyage 20
Dear Susan, I am your Antony — Emily D. 21
Marooned 22
My Cleopatra 24
In the bedlam of my chest 25
Kiting April — 26
Poiesis 28

II.
Arabian Nights, #1 33
Dear Divers, my Fellow Men — 34
Dents de Lion 36
The Daguerreotype [camera obscura] 38
Arabian Nights, #2 40
Susan’s Calls are like Antony’s Supper — 41
Paire de corps 42 Clothesline 43
Feral nights curl 45
My Windows 47
Jasminum 49
Far Reach 50
Arcturus 52

III.
The Last Fall 57
Today, I go fugitive — 58
Dear Sir, (No. 3) 59
Bedchamber, Last Days 61
Bedchamber with Bright’s 62
Limning, Death 63
Transitus, when the blue mist rises 64
Dear Sir, (No. 6) 67
I V.

The Loaded Gun (Translation No. 1) 73
The Loaded Gun (Translation No. 2) 76
The Loaded Gun (Translation No. 3) 78

Notes 81
Acknowledgments 87