Attracted by the unconventional, avant-garde, and seminal nature of her poems, Make Books Australia is developing a series of photo-driven titles under the banner ‘… poems by Emily Dickinson’. In keeping with Make Books Australia house style, this series will combine arresting poetry with strong, at times unconventional, imagery.

Born in Amherst, Massachusetts on 10th December 1830, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was prolific, yet her poetry was little-known during her life-time. Emily spent much of her life in self-imposed isolation, particularly during her later years. She did not marry, and conducted most friendships through prodigious correspondence.

A mere ten of her some eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime, along with a single letter from her vast trove of correspondence.

Only after her death, on 15th May 1886, was the extent of her output revealed when her younger sister, Lavinia, discovered the cache of Emily’s poems. From this point the poems began to attract public interest. Poems published during the seventy years following her death were subject to unsympathetic editing to make Emily’s style more acceptable to the tastes of the day. From the mid-1950s, Emily’s poems began to appear in their original form – which was often without titles, consisting of short lines, offering unconventional capitalisation and punctuation, and drawing on slant rhyme.

Further academic research, from the 1980s, led to the restoration of numerous mentions of Susan within poems, including the dedication of eleven poems to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, with who Emily was thought by some scholars to have had a romantic relationship.

Today, Emily Dickinson is regarded as pivotal figure in the development of the American poetry cannon.

The first title in the ‘… poems by Emily Dickinson‘ series is expected to be released during 2023.