The Emily Fables / Stephanie Emily Dickinson

writing where every image and figure of speech derives from that same landscape; a chronicle that lures the reader on, while the language and writing style demand immediate attention, insist that the reader pause to contemplate and to savor. It is a particular strength of The Emily Fables that reality and fable blend into a whole, where the one is entirely indistinguishable from the other, essential reading for anyone who can not stay away from compelling narrative told in exquisite language.

By Catherine Sasanov on December 19, 2016 Set on the Iowa prairie between 1887 and 1948, "Emily Fables" is Stephanie Dickinson’s homage to her grandmother and the lost world she inhabited. Dickinson brings all of her powers of compassion, an eye to detail, and her ability to look unflinchingly at suffering and uses them to conjure scenes of incredible poignancy and power: the pre-antibiotic world that Emily lived much of her life in, where diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough could take the life of one’s best friend in a day, or five of one’s classmates in a night. Where death might also be found in a hermit and his woman, discovered frozen and kneeling, side by side in the woods. Where hunger could drive a bobcat to almost attack two children, or, decades later, send a grown woman with an ax out of her farmhouse to butcher the reindeer she may or may not be hallucinating. Almost as strange and foreign as these scenes is that of Emily as precocious student in 1902, forced to leave school at 8th grade because education will only be wasted on a girl. As both poet and novelist, Stephanie Dickinson brings to bear the best of her well-honed skills in recreating scenes from Emily’s life, rescuing her grandmother from the fall into history’s silence where so many other women and girls lie. These beautiful, strange “fables” can read at times almost like scenes from Grimms' fairy tales yet are very American and barely a century gone.

By Rosalind Palermo Stevenson on December 16, 2016 In the first of these thirty-three exquisitely rendered fables the year is 1887 and “someone has left” the baby Emily naked in the orchard in sub-zero weather on her family’s farm in Iowa. She would surely have frozen to death before her father found her if God and nature and the farm’s two old ewes did not have their own purposes for the infant, and so it is joyously and with a gesture we might construe as miracle that the two old ewes on their knees enclose the infant Emily, and with their breath and fleece keep her warm and alive to live out her human life. The fables continue over the years of this life, as does Emily’s journey through her destiny, and the infant grows to child, and the child to young girl, to woman, to wife, to mother. The reader is taken through the stages and particularity of this life in each gorgeous fable, short as fables are meant to be short, but each one containing the breadth and richness of a novel. We are given to understand what it is to be born to rural America as the book transports us to heartland, to the time of Emily’s living, to the place of her living, to her heartbeat. We mourn with her the loss of her childhood friend, we shapeshift into a bobcat with her and her brother in the Iowa woods, we mourn the loss of her own infant, we mourn her dreams not to be realized of book learning, we admire her courage, we marvel at and are inspired by her almost holy acceptance of life as it is given. And through it all we are engulfed by the beauty of language. For what is writing if not language? And Stephanie Emily Dickinson is a master of language. Prose that is poetry, language that lifts and soars and the reader soars with it. I was held spellbound as I read this book. And when I finished I wanted to circle back to the beginning and read it all over again.