Called Back

Reviews / Votes

"Rosa Lane's Called Back breaks through the membrane that separates us from Dickinson's time. Here, we enter Dickinson's world brand new with the vigor of research re-imagined, obsession expressed with prolific inventiveness and mounting urgency, and language that astonishes in its apt, abundant, and irresistible embrace of sound. This is a book fearless in its approach and lavish in its accomplishment."
* Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, author of The Promise of a Normal Life: A Novel * "What marvelous, feral, eccentric, sweetly erotic poems! Like a candle in a frosted window, they illuminate-with electrifying language-the shadows of human love." * Henri Cole, author of Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 * "Reading Called Back is like floating through water, dipping into Lane's lyric obsession with Emily Dickinson as though on a raft made of erudite diction, vowel sounds, line breaks, and longing. Or it's like Lane's doppelganger-speaker-this less constrained Emily-laid her body out across the ocean and said, now float on me. The main conceit is to imagine, evoke, and call back to a new, less-othered Emily Dickinson, a 21st century Emily Dickinson more able to openly "swim / up the fish weir...spawn / in sandy silt along the odic / thighs of the Loire [to] flutter / our little deaths." This sexy book does not protest. It does not rant or shriek any grievance, though God knows it has a right to. Instead, it gives Emily back the "feral / utterances" Lane suggests her circumstances and time in history forbade her. This radical homage will delight Dickinson scholars and poets alike. And those who don't know yet how much poetry can liberate them should read it too."
* Adrian Blevins, author of Status Pending * "Lane's poems in tribute to Dickinson are a linguistic and lyrical tour de force, an object lesson in how the music of poetry finds purchase in the gaps between sound and silence. Lane's charged lines propel us through space and (un)soundings that bridge breathing and not breathing in poems that can render us as breathless as they leave us brimming. Ruah!" * Thomas McGuire, author of Steller's Orchid *