[It] Incandescent

by Amy Pence

[It] Incandescent puts us on the path near Emily Dickinson's home in a timeless Amherst where we embark on a multi-layered poems written by a fictional narrator are interceded by details from Emily's life as well as the tragic story that propels the narrator to a stunning, yet indeterminate, conclusion. What was Dickinson's "secret" and how does the experience of trauma both obscure and reveal? In this truly sui generis book, poetry, fiction, and fact blend, reminding us of the complex tissue of narratives and psychologies whenever we try to uncover the truth of someone's life, especially Emily Dickinson's.

110 pages, Paperback

Published March 7, 2018

About the author

Amy Pence authored the poetry collections The Decadent Lovely and Armor, Amour as well as the chapbooks Skin’s Dark Night and Your Posthumous Dress: Remnants from the Alexander McQueen Collection (dancing girl press, 2019). Her hybrid book with Emily Dickinson at its speculative center— [It] Incandescent – (Ninebark, 2018) won the Eyelands International Poetry Award in Athens, Greece. We Travel Towards It (Serving House Press, 2025) attentive to climate change’s losses, both collective and personal, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She’s also published short fiction, interviews, and essays in a variety of magazines, including The Writer’s Chronicle and Poets & Writers. Red Hen Press released her debut novel, Yellow, in 2026. She taught composition and poetry classes for many years, including at Emory, tutored high-schoolers, and is now a freelance tutor in Atlanta.

Reviews

[Karen Kao]

The found poem is a new animal to me, despite the fact that it's been around for 150 years. A friend used the term recently to describe a poem she'd written for our irregular poetry salon. Literary magazine Territory asks for citation and rights information for all found texts used in a submission. But the concept of found didn't really sink in until I read, over and over, It Incandescent by Amy Pence.

[It] Incandescent is a collection published by the independent publishing house Ninebark Press. This slim volume mixes poetry and prose, facts and fiction, two women conjoined by a terrible secret, the eponymous [It]. This is how the book opens:

Called Back. It's what her headstone says. The Dark ocellated. I recollect, orient. Summer in Amherst, near Emily Dickinson's grave. Headstones teeth the new dusk.

She: my obsession. Her biography, the poems I write. Knowing what she knew, what I once knew.

Here, I think, to research Emily. Or to find someone? Tread the light gravel. Called back, it seems, looking for the path between.

Between is a liminal space in [It] Incandescent. The border between the life of Emily Dickinson and the fictitious I, at the place where the fabric runs the thinnest. The poems in this collection approach, glance away, hint at the interconnections yet refuse to make the overt link.


To read the full review, please visit my website for Lost & Found.

[Dan Corrie]

Amy Pence’s *[It] Incandescent* is poignant book of controlled emotion and distilled, essentialized expression. The book-length poem weaves Emily Dickinson's life and poetry through its pages in a way that brings that poet into our time and in a way that feels warmly loving. Through the poem, Dickinson’s words and speculative biographical realities are braided poignantly with challenges faced by a woman of our current time. In my career, I worked with experts in putting together state family and children services trainings, including in the areas of child sexual abuse and domestic violence, which doubtless brought for me additional connection with this book: “my interior ravaged – until / [It] listens – The rungs on // the fingers are the rungs on / the gate . . . hemlocks coursing / that mistook the Nobody, that ghost / that didn’t know my course . . . traverse this life, know more than / we did . . . .” I admire Pence’s deft development, morphing and rhythms of Dickinson’s and her own imagistic motifs – of the nobody, of bowls, of boxes, of Indian pipes – em dashes, guiding threads, sutures. The poetry is movingly laden with the motif of the trauma of the elliptical that circles the secret: of the [it] unsaid, could-not-say, the X, the gaps, the what-have-you, the slant, the palimpsest. This is a beautiful, meaningful book.