“scraps” within Dickinson scholarship. But one might think of them as the sort of “small fabric” the poet writes of in one corner of a large envelope: “Excuse | Emily and | her Atoms | the North | Star is | of small | fabric but it | implies | much | presides | yet.” When we say small, we often mean less. When Emily Dickinson says small, she means fabric, Atoms, the North Star. In 1862, she wrote to her future editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, during a stretch when she was writing three hundred poems a year: “My little Force explodes – ” This enigmatic poet, petite by physical standards, is vast by all others. These small envelope poems carry a poignant yet fierce art and, as the poet Susan Howe has remarked, “arrive as if by telepathic electricity and connect without connectives.” Written with the full powers of her late, most radical period, these envelope poems seem intensely alive and charged with a special poignancy—addressed to no one and everyone at once. They remind us of the contingency, transience, vulnerability, and hope embodied in all our messages. The fragments in this book are selected from those reproduced in the complete collection of envelope writings, The Gorgeous Nothings, a collaboration between Marta L. Werner, the foremost scholar of Dickinson’s late work, and the poet and visual artist Jen Bervin (Christine Burgin/New Directions 2013; Granary Books 2012). Their transcriptions allow us to read the texts, while the facsimiles let us see exactly how Dickinson wrote them (the variant words, crossings-out, dashes, directional fields,