And I’m a Rose!

Emily Dickinson - AND I’M A ROSE! 211 Short Poems is an invitation to meet one of the most intense voices in American poetry in her sharpest, brightest form: the short lyric. Drawn from the nearly 1,800 poems she left in her Amherst bedroom, these 211 pieces focus on the lightning-flash side of Dickinson - poems that can be read in a breath and then echo for days. Selected and annotated by Nazzareno L. Todarello, this volume is part of Latorre Press’s Operamondo poetry series and brings the 'Myth of Amherst' into dialogue with a new generation of readers. The book opens with a vivid critical introduction, 'The Thunder in the Room', and a compact biographical essay, 'The Myth of Amherst', which situate Dickinson alongside Petrarch, Catullus and Bashō while tracing her transformation from witty New England daughter to radical recluse of the imagination. From there, the reader enters a carefully curated constellation of poems on nature, love, pain, faith, doubt and death - from 'A sepal, petal, and a thorn' to 'Fame is a bee' and 'My life closed twice before its close'. Each poem is printed in Dickinson’s characteristically compressed, slant-rhymed language, following the now-standard Johnson numbering. What makes this edition distinctive is its guiding voice. After each poem appears a 'Note for readers today': brief, contemporary glosses that speak in the language of screens, feeds and notifications, without ever trivialising the verse. These annotations read Dickinson as a kind of precocious 'sister' to digital-age sensibilities - a poet who, long before social media, understood micro-gestures, ghostings, glitches of memory and the way a single moment can feel like a full reboot of the self. The notes do not explain the poems away; instead, they offer angles of entry, analogies and emotional cues for readers who live inside the 24/7 present tense. The selection itself is designed for both immersion and sampling. The poems are arranged in a narrative arc that moves from the natural world into inner weather and metaphysical risk, while an Index of First Lines at the end of the book allows the reader to navigate alphabetically or to relocate favourite texts quickly. Whether read straight through or in brief encounters, the volume foregrounds Dickinson’s economy: her ability to compress whole philosophies into a handful of lines, to turn a rose, a bee or a twilight sky into an argument about time, loss and eternity. Published in 2025 by Latorre Press, AND I’M A ROSE! offers both an accessible entry point for newcomers and a fresh lens for long-time admirers. It treats Dickinson not as a museum piece, but as a live feed: a mind still capable of disturbing, consoling and electrifying us. For readers who suspect that a poem should fit into the space of a notification and still change the way they see the world, this book is an ideal place to begin.