This is remarkable and stimulating reading--not for what Werner teaches about Emily Dickinson, but for what she invites the reader to contemplate about the poet and the act of literary creation. The book is a 'meditation' on 40 short drafts and fragments by Dickinson of writings associated with Judge Otis Lord, the man she loved late in her life. Werner considers less the meaning of the words written, and more the paper on which they were written, the blurred pencil marks, the smudges, the actual shapes of words, lines, and phrases written in the poet's own hand. Along the way the author casts doubt and suspicion on all previous efforts at editing Dickinson--including the Thomas H. Johnson edition of her writings, traditionally considered definitive--which have ignored the unique and historical specifics of the manuscripts themselves in an effort to regularize Dickinson's writing for publication."--Choice"This bold and revealing presentation of the so-called 'Lord letters,' some forty drafts and fragments Dickinson wrote late in life (and all reproduced here in facsimile form along typed transcriptions) is a stunning affirmation of the insights textual scholarship can bring to literary understanding as well as a sobering reminder that manuscript texts are subject to the question of process and dynamic interpretation."--Nineteenth-Century Literature