Handwritten and Wordless Books > The Dickinson Composites
The subtext for this project is Emily Dickinson’s textual practice, one obscured by a century of editorial interventions. To create this work Jen Bervin took the fascicle groupings that Emily Dickinson created for her manuscript poems, and overlaid the pages of each fascicle digitally to create an image of the punctuation marks left out of the critical editions of Dickinson’s poems.
The result includes some of Dickinson’s variant words, all of the cross marks she used to refer to variants, and Dickinson’s ubiquitous dashes, which Bervin embroidered in a series of six quilts. The Granary edition serves as a sampler for the series, with one-to-one scale sewn excerpts, high-quality prints of the quilts, and an essay. Edition of 55.