Emily Dickinson's Lexicon - Katie Lehman - Bog

"POETRY: In this debut collection, Katie Lehman pays tribute to Emily Dickinson, with homage to the nineteenth-century American poet's lexicon of fierce vulnerability. Some poems quote Dickinson verbatim. Others channel Dickinson's radiant spirit in lyric narratives that reflect Lehman's own journey through a life lived close to the earth. We learn about Benedictine nuns tending the Victorian walled garden and farm at Kylemore Abbey on the west coast of Ireland, a newborn calf on a Mennonite dairy farm in Northern Indiana, the poet's coming-of- age among horses in Ohio, and school picture day during the Covid pandemic with her young son. Like Dickinson's, Lehman's poems pose a precise questioning of suffering and death through an inherent lens of light and hope. In the end, Lehman creates an emotional lexicon of her own that urges us not merely to enter but to bask in the sheer exuberance of language and find transport"--