Emily Dickinson’s Lexicon

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.

SAMPLE:

Monarch

Cyclical and sparse, her eyelid-thin wings approach

and disapproach among the grasses. Unassuming,

she only covets what she knows: a single worn reed

of herself, dark covert, uncoaxable as the worm

she once was. Before the white-spotted wings,

before the stained-glass veins. Idling brown earth

at close measure. Closer at length, but she knows

closeness is not her answer. If it is a loveliness

she feels or a kind of loneliness, only the husbandry

of tears will make her radiance known. How her

cautious love perplexes the moth who darts

unblinkingly into the porch light. Filamental,

she is compatible to late dusk or perceivable grief.

Admonish, and she’s gone-yet I conspire she longs

for earth’s untiring clasp, longs even, all preconceptions

removed-to lay her orange and black chivalry down.