Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with the shame of his desires, he runs away to remote Scotland with a piece of experimental tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to only use it three times, Jeff – self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating – ignores this advice. In the late 1860s, Leonora lives a contented life in the Scottish Highlands, surrounded by nature, her hands and mind kept busy. Contemplating her future and the social conventions that bind her, a secret romantic friendship with the local laird is interrupted when her father sends her to stay with her aunt in Edinburgh – an intimidating, sooty city; the place where her mother perished. But Leonora’s ability to embrace her new life is shadowed by a dark presence that begins to lurk behind her eyes, and strange visions that bear no resemblance to anything she has ever seen or known… A Superior Spectre is a highly accomplished debut novel about our capacity for curiosity, and our dangerous entitlement to it, and reminds us the scariest ghosts aren’t those that go bump in the night, but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul.

Although Emily Dickinson copied and bound her poems into manuscript notebooks, in the century since her death her poems have been read as single lyrics with little or no regard for the context she created for them in her fascicles. Choosing Not Choosing is the first book-length consideration of the poems in their manuscript context. Sharon Cameron demonstrates that to read the poems with attention to their placement in the fascicles is to observe scenes and subjects unfolding between and among poems rather than to think of them as isolated riddles, enigmatic in both syntax and reference. Thus Choosing Not Choosing illustrates that the contextual sense of Dickinson is not the canonical sense of Dickinson. Considering the poems in the context of the fascicles, Cameron argues that an essential refusal of choice pervades all aspects of Dickinson's poetry. Because Dickinson never chose whether she wanted her poems read as single lyrics or in sequence (nor is it clear where any fascicle text ends, or even how, in context, a poem is bounded), "not choosing" is a textual issue; it is also a formal issue because Dickinson refused to chose among poetic variants; it is a thematic issue; and, finally, it is a philosophical one, since what is produced by "not choosing" is a radical indifference to difference. Extending the readings of Dickinson offered in her earlier book Lyric Time, Cameron continues to enlarge our understanding of the work of this singular American poet.

The strange rhymes of Emily Dickinson's verse have offended some readers, attracted others, and proved a stumbling block for critics. In the first thorough analysis of the poet's rhyming practices, Judy Jo Small goes beyond simple classification and enumeration to reveal the aesthetic and semantic value of Dickinson's rhymes and show how they help shape the meaning of her lyrics. Considering Dickinson's rhyming technique in light of its historical context, Small argues that the poet's radical innovations were both an outgrowth of nineteenth-century aesthetics ideas about the music of poetry and a reaction against conventional constraints—not the least of which was the image of the female poet as a songbird pouring forth her soul's joys and sorrows in lyrical melody. Unlike other scholars, Small attaches special importance to Dickinson's own musical background. Revealing Dickinson's auditory imagination as a primary source of her poetic power, Small shows that sound is an important subject in the verse and that the phonetic texture contributes to the meaning. By looking closely at individual poems, Small demonstrates that Dickinson's deviations from "normal" rhyme schemes play a significant part in her artistic design: her modulations and dislocations of rhyme serve to structure the poems and contribute to their dynamic shifts of mood and meaning. Analyzing Dickinson's more daring experiments, Small shows how the poet achieved uncanny effects with fluctuating partial rhymes in some poems and with homonymic puns in others. It is in the interplay between the musical and the written aspects of Dickinson's language, Small contends, that her poetry comes alive. Small takes particular note of the use of rhyme at the ends of poems, illustrating Dickinson's brilliant effects in closing some poems decisively and in leaving others tantalizingly open-ended. Teaching us how to listen to Dickinson's poems and not simply to scrutinize them on paper,Positive as Soundis an innovative, lucidly written book that contributes not only to Dickinson scholarship but also to the general study of poetics.

The Art Songs of Louise Talma presents some of Talma’s finest compositions and those most frequently performed during her life. It includes pieces appropriate for beginning, intermediate, and advanced singers and collaborative pianists. The songs include text settings of American, English, and French poets and writers, including Native American poems, works by W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, e. e. cummings, John Donne, Gerald Manley Hopkins, William Shakespeare, and Wallace Stevens, as well as poems from medieval France and religious texts. Because of the popularity of Talma’s choral works and the fact that her works for voice and piano were performed often, this sourcebook will be useful to singers at all stages of their careers, as well as scholars of twentieth-century music as a whole. The diversity of compositional approaches Talma used provides a snapshot of American trends in composition during the twentieth century; during the course of her career, Talma moved from neo-classicism to serialism and finally to non-strict serial-derived atonality in her works. Inclusion of performance and reception histories of the songs helps trace changing public taste in American art song and the repertoire of performers, particularly those interested in contemporary music.

American composer Louise Talma (1906-1996) was the first female winner of two back-to-back Guggenheim Awards (1946, 1947), the first American woman to have an opera premiered in Europe (1962), the first female winner of the Sibelius Award for Composition (1963), and the first woman composer elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1974). This book analyses Talma’s works in the context of her life, focusing on the effects on her work of two major changes she made during her adult life: her conversion to Catholicism as an adult, under the guidance of Nadia Boulanger, and her adoption of serial compositional techniques. Employing approaches from traditional musical analysis, feminist and queer musicology, and women’s autobiographical theory to examine Talma’s body of works, comprising some eighty pieces, this is the first full-length study of this pioneering composer. Exploring Talma’s compositional language, text-setting practices, and the incorporation of autobiographical elements into her works using her own letters, sketches, and scores, as well as a number of other relevant documents, this book positions Talma’s contributions to serial and atonal music in the United States, considers her role as a woman composer during the twentieth century, and evaluates the legacy of her works and career in American music.

Emily Dickinson is the iconic American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends, and also explore aesthetics, society, nature and spirituality. This meticulously edited poetry collection includes her complete poetical works, as well as her letters and the biography of this powerful author: The Life and Legacy of Emily Dickinson (Illustrated Biography) Poems—First Series: Book I.—Life: Success Our share of night to bear Rouge et Noir Rouge gagne Glee! the storm is over If I can stop one heart from breaking Almost A wounded deer leaps highest The heart asks pleasure first In a Library Much madness is divinest sense I asked no other thing Exclusion The Secret The Lonely House To fight aloud is very brave Dawn The Book of Martyrs The Mystery of Pain I taste a liquor never brewed A Book I had no time to hate, because Unreturning Whether my bark went down at sea Belshazzar had a letter The brain within its groove Book II.—Love: Mine Bequest Alter? When the hills do Suspense Surrender If you were coming in the fall With a Flower Proof Have you got a brook in your little heart? Transplanted The Outlet In Vain Renunciation Love's Baptism Resurrection Apocalypse The Wife Apotheosis Book III.—Nature: New feet within my garden go May-Flower Why? Perhaps you 'd like to buy a flower The pedigree of honey A Service of Song The bee is not afraid of me Summer's Armies The Grass A little road not made of man Summer Shower Psalm of the Day The Sea of Sunset Purple Clover The Bee Presentiment is that long shadow As children bid the guest good-night Angels in the early morning So bashful when I spied her Two Worlds The Mountain A Day The butterfly's assumption-gown The Wind Death and Life 'T was later when the summer went Indian Summer Autumn Beclouded The Hemlock There's a certain slant of light Book IV.—Time and Eternity: One dignity delays for all Too late Astra Castra Safe in their alabaster chambers On this long storm the rainbow rose From the Chrysalis Setting Sail Look back on time with kindly eyes A train went through a burial gate I died for beauty, but was scarce Troubled about many things Real The Funeral I went to thank her I've seen a dying eye... Poems—Second Series (160+ poems) Poems—Third Series (160+ poems) The Single Hound (140+ verses) The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson