In words and dashes dealt like breaths, like blades, like bullets, she would limn the terror of abandonment in a short verse, the otherworldliness of a total solar eclipse in two perfect stanzas, the soaring fragility of hope in a single line, meticulously calibrating the gravitational pull of her words to keep the reader suspended along the event horizon of meaning, perpetually circling but never fully falling into the depths of her truth.
On Dickinson
