Emily Dickinson

On the website of the American Academy of Poets, Emily Dickinson's biography includes this: "Upon her death, Dickinson's family discovered 40 handbound volumes of nearly 1800 of her poems, or 'fascicles' as they are sometimes called. These booklets were made by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems in an order that many critics believe to be more than chronological."How fitting, then, the folded muslin arms of the found sculpture in a Cowan storefront. This Dickinson -- mesh, metal, and cloth -- stares out of the empty shop window, a study in plainness and loneliness, like the real one holed up in near silence in her father's house, where she wrote and stored away her poems.

Instead of storing poems in a trunk, this Emily writes them in the viewer's eyes.