INSTRUCTIONS for Reading [IT]*:
1. Sniff: the print smells good on the page. No digital aftertaste.**
2. Flip: the pages feint/ faint with color : lavender (veins seen faintly through skin) + burgundy (closer to the surface).
3. Tuck: perhaps under covers, perhaps in a tent near a fire, perhaps rain preambulates across your roof. If it's daytime, well then okay...
4. Yes, begin at the beginning. Resist the impulse to skip around.
5. The pull of Emily is the pull into who it is we want to see. See what you will.
6. (I was once told to avoid the word "it" in my poetry. Ha-ha! I was also told to quit changing styles and modes and to line everything up at the left margin. Really? Are you me? No.)
7. Dickinson was also told to do and not do many things with & to her poetry. The universe: ha-ha!
8. Listening music, if that's your thing: cellos or piano. See esp. Zoe Keating's INTO THE TREES or complicated piano. You choose.
9. There are many ways into IT and to read IT...
10. After, resist (or not) the impulse to skirt the woods looking for these: Monotropa uniflora-- the corpse plant or indian pipes that Dickinson so loved... I was lucky to have found these near Hambidge Creative Arts Residency near the Falls...so very small...exactly while I was writing [It]...I looked again...and I never found them.
11. Be you, as you will***
*trigger warning: this book deals with incest
**you can purchase your copy from me on my website, & have it signed...or go to Ninebark Press
***tell me what you thought of [It] because books go out like commercials these days...with no comment...