Two Emilys

In Two Emilys, Dickinson and Brontë meet in the memory and imagination of a master poet. Potos evokes these writers-contemporaries living across the Atlantic from one another-as muses and mentors, following in Brontë's steps across the moors, their "wuthering skies", "the gorse / grazing my ankles as I go." And we are there with her, blown about by the wind that "is wider up there", where the "moor air / erases your every last edge". At the Emily Dickinson Museum, Potos wonders "how would it be to live / in the aftermath of her? Would she guide / my hand across the modern page?" One is tempted to say yes. Potos daringly takes up the challenge of situating herself among the greatest writers of their age and succeeds brilliantly.

-Judith Sornberger, author of The Sorority of Stillness: A Gallery of Women in Art and I Call to You from Time

Andrea Potos invites us to join writers in a quiet Amherst bedroom, or fields where wind erases the edges of heather and gorse-or to be delighted by remembered poets in a mall, a gym or a movie theater. In these poems, time beautifully splits, like light through a chandelier or a glass doorknob.

-Jeannine Atkins, author of Green Promises: Girls Who Loved the Earth and Borrowed Names: Poems About Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie and their Daughters

A literature lover's dream! Through dream, letter, history, travel, memory and pure imagination, we enter the real and literary lives of not only two Emilys, but also an Andrea. I love the weaving in of familiar themes and language-from the moor and gorse to the white gown and the Amherst home-plus there are plenty of surprises! It's a joy of a collection to read-a playful, soulful honoring of two writers who changed the ways we see the world.

-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path