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Emily Dickinson has often been pictured as a sensitive but isolated poet—someone who published very little in her lifetime and limited herself to lyrics, considered to be the kind of poems most removed from social and political life. In recent years, scholars have challenged that view, and this book extends the discussion in valuable new directions. 

Domhnall Mitchell begins by focusing on three historical phenomena—the railroad, the Dickinson homestead, and horticulture—and argues that poems about trains, home, and flowers engage with their meanings in ways that extend beyond the confines of the aesthetic. He shows how Dickinson's poems and letters reveal the full complexity of her position as a woman situated within a larger social and economic class. 

In the second half of the book, Mitchell considers the ideological, textual, and editorial implications of Dickinson's strategic privatization of her art. He relates the particular forms of her manuscripts' appearance, distribution, and collation to aspects of her social as well as her literary consciousness. In a chapter that is certain to provoke debate, he explores what it means to read individual poems and letters in manuscript versions rather than in printed editions. By paying close attention to textual evidence, he makes the case that various features of the manuscripts are actually matters of accident or immediate convenience rather than the visual markers of a new aesthetic principle. 

Mitchell closes by using the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to explore the contradictions of a “private” poetry that engages verbally in multiple areas of nineteenth-century life and discourse. By attending to the contemporaneous particularities of recurrent words and images, he demonstrates that Dickinson could stay at home and still be at home in history, too.

     The fifteen stories of George Garrett’s Empty Bed Blues (his eighth book-length collection) are vintage Garrett—no two alike—with each moving, one way and another, in new and daring directions. His stories are deeply concerned with the old verities of love and death and filled with the joys and woes of characters who come to life and command our attention.

            Diversity is the key word for Garrett’s short fiction. He works in every known form and invents a few himself. In “A Story Goes with It,” Garrett fondly remembers an old friend while retelling a story the man once told him. Most of it is probably not accurate, as Garrett is quick to admit, but the mixture of fact with fiction makes for an entertaining read. His stories turn like the sharp curves of a mountain road, abruptly changing from a fond trip down memory lane to a sleazy reporter’s quest along the backroads for the ultimate crime story in “Pornographers.”He tops off his collection with “A Short History of the Civil War,” a series of poems written by two participants: one a Confederate, the other a Yankee.

            In the marriage of fact and fiction, of comedy and pathos, and the music of many voices, the stories of Empty Bed Blues reconfirm the judgment of novelist and story writer Richard Bausch, who said in 1998: “There is no writer on the American scene with a more versatile, more eclectic, or more restless talent than George Garrett.”
 

Welcome to Las Vegas. Hope you like it here. You aren’t leaving.

It’s a Las Vegas of outcasts, outsiders, obsessives, and oddballs—a place seen through the eyes of those who call it home in Extinction Studies.

In these stories, a young genius from a troubled home becomes obsessed with solving an infamous atomic-era murder. Twin brothers exploring subterranean tunnels beneath the Strip encounter a stranger who claims he can show them the future. A nonverbal boy devises a daring scheme to revive his punch-drunk prizefighter father’s fading glory. And in the title story, a teenager struggling in the aftermath of a traumatic event finds healing in B monster movies and a TV host who’s a cross between Dracula and Elvis.

Shane Joaquin Jimenez’s short stories deliver you far beyond the glitz and neon of the Strip. Across ten haunting tales, Jimenez takes a whirlwind tour of dark stage magic, macabre murder, moonlit desert graves, and the city’s unknown, unlucky underdogs fighting to the bitter end, no matter the odds.

Told with brutal honesty that is at turns uncanny and unsettling, nightmarish and psychedelic, exhilarating and moving, Extinction Studies uncovers the ineradicable hope at the heart of the strange neon city, shining out in the middle of nowhere.